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BY THE SAM AUTHOR. 



A PEESENT HEAVEN 

I volume. i6mo. % i.oo. 



TWO FEIENDS 

1 volume. i6mo. $i.oo. 



In Press, 

POEMS. 



OUK SINGLE WOMEN 

BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 



TICKNOR AND FIELDS, Publishers. 



THE 



Patience of Hope 



BY 



THE AUTHOR OF «A PRESENT HEAVEN'* 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION 

BT 

JOHN G. WHITTIER 

7 




»T TENEO ET TENSOR 



BOSTON 

TICK NOR AND FIELDS 

1863 






The I^lBRARY 

OP Congress 

WASHINOTOM 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1862, by 

TICKNOR AND FIELDS, 

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the District of Massachusetts. 



SEVENTH EDITION 



UNIVERSITY PJIESS: 

Welch, Bigelow, and Company 
Cambridge. 



Introduction. 



^ ^^^^^^'^ HERE are men who, irrespective of 
the names by which they are called 




in the Babel confusion of sects, are 
i endeared to the common heart of 
Christendom. Our doors open of their own 
accord to receive them. For in them we feel 
that in some faint degree, and with many lim- 
itations, the Divine is again manifested : some- 
thing of the Infinite Love shines out of them ; 
their very garments have healing and fragrance 
borrowed from the bloom of Paradise. So of 
books. There are volumes which perhaps con- 
tain many things, in the matter of doctrine and 
illustration, to which our reason does not assent, 
but which nevertheless seem permeated with a 
certain sweetness and savor of life. They have 
the Divine seal and imprimatur ; they are fra- 
grant with heart's-ease and asphodel ; tonic with 
the leaves which are for the healing of the na- 



vi INTRODUCTION. 

tions. The meditations of the devout monk of 
Kempen are the common heritage of Catholic 
and Protestant ; our hearts burn within us as we 
walk with Augustine under Numidian fig-trees 
in the gardens of Verecundus ; Fenelon from 
his bishop's palace, and John Woolman from 
his tailor's shop, speak to us in the same lan- 
guage. The unknown author of that book 
which Luther loved next to his Bible, the 
" Theologia Germanica" is just as truly at 
home in this present age, and in the ultra Prot- 
estantism of New England, as in the heart of 
Catholic Europe, and in the fourteenth century. 
For such books know no limitations of time 
or place ; they have the perpetual freshness and 
fitness of truth ; they speak out of profound 
experience : heart answers to heart as we read 
them ; the spirit that is in man, and the inspira- 
tion that giveth understanding, bear witness to 
them. The bent and stress of their testimony 
are the same, whether written in this or a past 
century, by Catholic or Quaker : self-renuncia- 
tion, — reconcilement to the Divine will through 
simple faith in the Divine goodness, and the 
love of it which must needs follow its recogni- 
tion, — the life of Christ made our own by self- 
denial and sacrifice, and the fellowship of his 
suffering for the good of others, — the indwell- 



INTRODUCTION. yii 

ing Spirit, leading into all truth, — the Divine 
Word nigh us, even in our hearts. They have 
little to do w^ith creeds, or schemes of doctrine, 
or the partial and inadequate plans of salvation 
invented by human speculation and ascribed to 
Him v^ho — it is sufficient to know — is able 
to save unto the uttermost all who trust in him. 
They insist upon simple faith and holiness of 
life, rather than rituals or modes of worship ; 
they leave the merely formal, ceremonial, and 
temporal part of religion to take care of itself, 
and earnestly seek for the substantial, the neces- 
sary, and the permanent. 

With these legacies of devout souls, it seems 
to me, the little volume herewith presented is 
not wholly unworthy of a place. It assumes 
the life and power of the Gospel as a matter of 
actual experience ; it bears unmistakable evidence 
of a realization, on the part of its author, of the 
truth, that Christianity is not simply historical 
and traditional, but present and permanent, with 
its roots in the infinite past and its branches in 
the infinite future, the eternal spring and growth 
of Divine love ; not the dying echo of words 
uttered centuries ago, never to be repeated, but 
God's good tidings spoken afresh in every soul, 
— the perennial fountain and unstinted outflow 
of wisdom and goodness, forever old and forever 



viii INTRODUCTION. 

new. It is a lofty plea for patience, trust, hope, 
and holy confidence, under the shadow, as well 
as in the light, of Christian experience, whether 
the cloud seems to rest on the tabernacle, or 
moves guidingly forward. It is perhaps too ex- 
clusively addressed to those who minister in the 
inner sanctuary, to be entirely intelligible to the 
vaster number who wait in the outer courts ; 
it overlooks, perhaps, too much the solidarity 
and oneness of humanity ; * but all who read 
it will feel its earnestness, and confess to the 
singular beauty of its style, the strong, steady 
march of its argument, and the wide and varied 
learning which illustrates it. To use the lan- 
guage of one of its reviewers in the Scottish 
press : — 

'' Beauty there is in the book ; exquisite 
glimpses into the loveliness of nature here and 
there shine out from its lines, — a charnv want- 
ing which meditative writing always seems to 
have a defect ; beautiful gleams, too, there are 
of the choicest things of art, and frequent allu- 
sions by the way to legend or picture of the 
religious past ^ so that, while you read, you 



* " The good are not so good as I once thought, nor the bad 
60 evil; and in all there is more for grace to make advantage of, 
and more to testify for God and holiness, than I once believed." 
•^Baxter, 



INTRODUCTION. ix 

wander by a clear brook of thought, coming 
far from the beautiful hills, and winding away 
from beneath the sunshine of gladness and 
beauty into the dense, mysterious forest of hu- 
man existence, that loves to sing, amid the 
shadow of human darkness and anguish, its 
music of heaven-born consolation ; bringing, 
too, its pure waters of cleansing and healing, 
yet evermore making its praise of holy affec- 
tion and gladness ; while it is still haunted by 
the spirits of prophet, saint, and poet, repeat- 
ing snatches of their strains, and is led on, as 
by a spirit from above, to join the great river 

of God's truth 

"This is a book for Christian men, for the 
quiet hour of holy solitude, when the heart 
longs and waits for access to the presence of 
the Master. The weary heart that thirsts 
amidst its conflicts and its toils for refreshing 
water, will drink eagerly of these sweet and 
refreshing words. To thoughtful men and 
women, especially such as have learnt any of 
the patience of hope in the experiences of sor- 
row and trial, we commend this little volume 
most heartily and earnestly." 

'* The Patience of Hope " fell into my hands 

soon after its publication in Edinburgh, some 
1# 



X INTRODUCTION. 

two years ago. I was at once impressed by 
its extraordinary richness of language and Im 
agery, — its deep and solemn tone of medi- 
tation in rare combination with an eminent- 
ly practical tendency, — philosophy warm and 
glowing with love. It will, perhaps, be less the 
fault of the writer than of her readers, if they 
are not always able to eliminate from her 
highly poetical and imaginative language the 
subtle metaphysical verity or phase of religious 
experience which she seeks to express, or that 
they are compelled to pass over, without ap- 
propriation, many things which are nevertheless 
profoundly suggestive as vague possibilities of 
the highest life. All may not be able to find 
in some of her Scriptural citations the exact 
weight and significance so apparent to her own 
mind. She startles us, at times, by her novel 
applications of familiar texts, by meanings re- 
flected upon them from her own spiritual in- 
tuitions, making the barren Baca of the letter 
a well. If the rendering be questionable, the 
beauty and quaint felicity of illustration and 
comparison are unmistakable ; and we call to 
mind Augustine's saying, that two or more 
widely varying interpretations of Scripture may 
be alike true in themselves considered. '' When 
one saith, ' Moses meant as I do,* and an- 



INTRODUCTION. xi 

other saith, ' Nay, but as I do/ I ask, more 
reverently, ' Why not rather as both, if both 
be true?" 

Some minds, for instance, will hesitate to as- 
sent to the use of certain Scriptural passages, as 
evidence that He who is the Light of men, the 
Way and the Truth, in the mystery of his econ- 
omy, designedly "delays, withdraws, and even 
hides himself from those who love and follow 
him." They will prefer to impute spiritual 
dearth and darkness to human weakness, to the 
selfishness which seeks a sign for itself, to evil 
imaginations indulged, to the taint and burden 
of some secret sin, or to some disease and ex- 
aggeration of the conscience, growing out of 
bodily infirmity, rather than to any purpose on 
the part of our Heavenly Father to perplex and 
mislead his children. The sun does not shine 
the less because one side of our planet is in 
darkness. To borrow the words of Augustine : 
''Thou, Lord, forsakest nothing thou hast made. 
Thou alone art near to those even who remove 
far from thee. Let them turn and seek thee, 
for not as they have forsaken their Creator hast 
thou forsaken thy creation." It is only by 
holding fast the thought of Infinite Goodness, 
and interpreting doubtful Scripture and inward 
spiritual experience by the light of that central 



xii INTRODUCTION. 

idea, that we can altogether escape the dreadful 
conclusion of Pascal, that revelation has been 
given us in dubious cipher, contradictory and 
mystical, in order that some, through miracu- 
lous aid, may understand it to their salvation, 
and others be mystified by it to their eternal 
loss. 

I might mention other points of probable 
divergence between reader and writer, and in- 
dicate more particularly my own doubtful pause 
and hesitancy over some of these pages. But 
it is impossible for me to make one to whom 
I am so deeply indebted an offender for a 
word or a Scriptural rendering. On the grave 
and awful themes which she discusses, I have 
little to say in the way of controversy. I 
would listen, rather than criticise. The utter- 
ances of pious souls, in all ages, are to me often 
like fountains in a thirsty land, strengthening 
and refreshing, yet not without an after-taste 
of human frailty and inadequateness, a slight 
bitterness of disappointment and unsatisfied 
quest. Who has not felt at times that the 
letter killeth, that prophecies fail, and tongues 
cease to edify, and been ready to say, with the 
author of the " Imitation of Christ *' : " Speak, 
Lord, for thy servant heareth. Let not Moses 
nor the prophets speak to me, but speak thou 



INTRODUCTION. xiii 

rather, who art the Inspirer and Enlightener of 
all. I am weary with reading and hearing many 
things ; let all teachers hold their peace ; let 
all creatures keep silence : speak thou alone 
to me." 

The writer of " The Patience of Hope " had, 
previous to its publication, announced herself to 
a fit, if small, audience of earnest and thoughtful 
Christians, in a little volume entitled, " A Pres- 
ent Heaven." She has recently published a 
collection of poems, of which so competent a 
judge as Dr. Brown, the author of " Horae 
Subsecivae " and " Rab and his Friends," thus 
speaks, in the North British Review : — 

" Such of our readers — a fast increasing 
number — as have read and enjoyed 'The Pa- 
tience of Hope,' listening to the gifted nature 
which, through such deep and subtile thought, 
and through affection and godliness still deeper 
and more quick, has charmed and soothed them, 
will not be surprised to learn that she is not 
only poetical, but, what is more, a poet, and 
one as true as George Herbert and Henry 
Vaughan, or our own Cowper; for, with all 
our admiration of the searching, fearless spec- 
ulation, the wonderful power of speaking clear- 
ly upon dark and all but unspeakable subjects, 
the rich outcome of ' thoughts that wander 



xiv INTRODUCTION. 

through eternity/ which increases every time we 
take up that wonderful little book, we confess 
we were surprised at the kind and the amount 
of true poetic vis in these poems, from the same 
fine and strong hand. There is a personality 
and immediateness, a sort of sacredness and 
privacy, as if they were overheard rather than 
read, which gives to these remarkable produc- 
tions a charm and a flavor all their own. With 
no eiFort, no consciousness of any end but that 
of uttering the inmost thoughts and desires of 
the heart, they flow out as clear, as living, as 
gladdening as the wayside well, coming from 
out the darkness of the central depths, filtered 
into purity by time and travel. The waters 
are copious, sometimes to overflowing ; but they 
are always limpid and unforced, singing their 
own quiet tune, not saddening, though some- 
times sad, and their darkness not that of obscu- 
rity, but of depth, like that of the deep sea. 

''This is not a book to criticise or speak 
about, and we give no extracts from the longer, 
and in this case, we think, the better poems. 
In reading this Cardiphonia set to music, we 
have been often reminded, not only of Herbert 
and Vaughan, but of Keble, — a likeness of the 
spirit, not of the letter ; for if there is any one 
poet who has given a bent to her mind, it is 



INTRODUCTION. 



XV 



Wordsworth, — the greatest of all our century's 
poets, both in himself and in his power of mak- 
ing poets.** 

In the belief that whoever peruses the fol- 
lowing pages will be sufficiently interested in 
their author to be induced to turn back and 
read over again, with renewed pleasure, extracts 
from her metrical writings, I copy from the 
volume so warmly commended a few brief 
pieces and extracts from the longer poems. 

Here are three sonnets, each a sermon in 
itself: — 



ASCENDING. 

They who from mountain-peaks have gazed upon 
The wide, illimitable heavens, have said. 
That, still receding as they climbed, outspread. 

The blue vault deepens over them, and, one 

By one drawn further back, each starry sun 
Shoots down a feebler splendor overhead. 
So, Saviour, as our mounting spirits, led 

Along Faith's living way to Thee, have won 

A nearer access, up the difficult track 
Still pressing, on that rarer atmosphere. 

When low beneath us flits the cloudy rack. 

We see Thee drawn within a widening sphere 

Of glory, from us further, further back, — 
Yet is it then because we are more near. 



3cvi INTRODUCTION. 

LIFE TAPESTRY. 

Too long have I, methought, with tearful eye 

Pored o'er this tangled work of mine, and mused 
Above each stitch awry and thread confused ; 
Now will I think on what in years gone by 
I heard of them that weave rare tapestry 
At royal looms, and how they constant use 
To work on the rough side, and still peruse 
The pictured pattern set above them high ; 
So will I set MY COPY high above. 

And gaze and gaze till on my spirit grows 
Its gracious impress ; till some line of love. 

Transferred upon my canvas, faintly glows ; 
Nor look too much on warp or woof, provide 
He whom I work for sees their fairer side ! 

HOPE. 

When I do think on thee, sweet Hope, and how 
Thou followest on our steps, a coaxing child 
Oft chidden hence, yet quickly reconciled, 
Still turning on us a glad, beaming brow. 
And red, ripe lips for kisses : even now 
Thou mindest me of him, the Ruler mild. 
Who led God's chosen people through the wild. 
And bore with wayward murmurers, meek as thou 
That bringest waters from the Rock, with bread 
Of angels strewing Earth for us ! like him 
Thy force abates not, nor thine eye grows dim ; 
But still with milk and honey-droppings fed. 
Thou leadest to the Promised Country fair. 
Though thou^ like Moses, may'st not enter there ! 



INTRODUCTION. xvii 

There is something very weird and striking 
in the following lines : — 

GONE. 

Alone, at midnight as he knelt, his spirit was aware 
Of Somewhat falling in between the silence and the 
prayer; 

A bell's dull clangor that hath sped so far, it faints 

and dies 
So soon as it hath reached the ear whereto its errand 

lies ; 

And as he rose up from his knees, his spirit was 

aware 
Of Somewhat, forceful and unseen, that sought to 

hold him there ; 

As of a Form that stood behind, and on his shoulders 

prest 
Both hands to stay his rising up, and Somewhat in 

his breast. 

In accents clearer far than words, spake, *' Pray yet 

longer, pray. 
For one that ever prayed for thee this night hath 

passed away; 

"A soul, that climbing hour by hour the silver- 
shining stair 

That leads to God's great treasure-house, grew covet- 
ous ; and there 

B 



xviii INTRODUCTION. 

" Was stored no blessing and no boon, for thee she 

did not claim, 
(So lowly, yet importunate!) and ever with tby 

name 

*' She link'd — that none in earth or heaven might 

hinder it or stay — 
One Other Name, so strong, that thine hath never 
missed its way. 

** This very night within my arms this gracious soul 

I bore 
Within the Gate, where many a prayer of hers had 

gone before ; 

"And where she resteth, evermore one constant 

song they raise 
Of * Holy, holy,' so that nozt; I know not if she 

prays ; 

*' But for the voice of praise in Heaven, a voice of 

Prayer hath gone 
From Earth ; thy name upriseth now no more ; 

pray on, pray on ! " 

The following may serve as a specimen of 
the writer's lighter, half-playful strain of mor- 
alizing : — 

SEEKING. 

" And where, and among what pleasant places. 
Have ye been, that ye come again 



INTRODUCTION. xix 

With your laps so full of flowers, and your faces 

Like buds blown fresh after rain ? '* 
'' We have been," said the children speaking 

In their gladness, as the birds chime. 
All together, — '* we have been seeking 

For the Fairies of olden time ; 
For we thought, they are only hidden, — 

They would never surely go 
From this green earth all unbidden. 

And the children that love them so ; 
Though they come not around us leaping. 

As they did when they and the world 
Were young, we shall find them sleeping 

Within some broad leaf curled ; 
For the lily its white doors closes 

But only over the bee. 
And we looked through the summer roses. 

Leaf by leaf, so carefully ; 
But we thought, rolled up we shall find them 

Among mosses old and dry ; 
From gossamer threads that bind them. 

They will start like the butterfly. 
All winged : so we went forth seeking. 

Yet still they have kept unseen ; 
Though we think our feet have been keeping 

The track where they have been. 
For we saw where their dance went flying 

O'er the pastures, — snowy white 
Their seats and their tables lying, 

O'erthrown in their sudden flight. 



XX 



INTRODUCTION. 



And they, too, have had their losses. 

For we found the goblets white 
And red in the old spiked mosses. 

That they drank from over-night ; 
And in the pale horn of the woodbine 

Was some wine left, clear and bright ; 
But we found," said the children, speaking 

More quickly, ** so many things. 
That we soon forgot we were seeking, — 

Forgot all the Fairy rings. 
Forgot all the stories olden 

That we hear round the fire at night. 
Of their gifts and their favors golden, — 

The sunshine was so bright ; 
And the flowers — we found so many 

That it almost made us grieve 
To think there were some, sweet as any. 

That we were forced to leave ; 
As we left, by the brook-side lying. 

The balls of drifted foam. 
And brought (after all our trying) 

These Guelder-roses home.'* 

*^ Then, oh ! " I heard one speaking 

Beside me soft and low, 
" I have been, like the blessed children, seeking. 

Still seeking, to and fro ; 
Yet not, like them, for the Fairies, — 

They might pass unmourned away 
For me, that had looked on angels — 

On angels that would not stay ; 



INTRODUCTION. xxi 

No ! not though in haste before them 

I spread all my heart's best cheer. 
And made love my banner o'er them. 

If it might but keep them here ; 
They stayed but awhile to rest them ; 

Long, long before its close. 
From my feast, though I mourned and prest them. 

The radiant guests arose ; 
And their flitting wings struck sadness 

And silence ; never more 
Hath my soul won back the gladness. 

That was its own before. 
No ; I mourned not for the Fairies 

When I had seen hopes decay. 
That were sweet unto my spirit 

So long ; I said, * If they. 
That through shade and sunny weather 

Have twined about my heart. 
Should fade, we must go together. 

For we can never part ! ' 
But my care was not availing, 

I found their sweetness gone ; 
I saw their bright tints paling ; — 

They died ; yet I lived on. 

*' Yet seeking, ever seeking 

Like the children, I have won 
A guerdon all undreamt of 

When first my quest begun. 
And my thoughts come back like wanderers. 

Out-wearied, to my breast ; 



xxii INTRODUCTION. 

What they sought for long they found not. 

Yet was the Unsought best. 
For I sought not out for crosses, 

I did not seek for pain ; 
Yet I find the heart's sore losses 

Were the spirit's surest gain." 

In " A Meditation," the writer ventures, not 
without awe and reverence, upon that dim, un- 
sounded ocean of mystery, the life beyond. 

"But is there prayer 
Within your quiet Homes, and is there care 
For those ye leave behind ? I would address 
My spirit to this theme in humbleness : 

No tongue nor pen hath uttered or made known 
This mystery, and thus I do but guess 

At clearer types through lowlier patterns shown ; 
Yet when did Love on earth forsake its own ? 

Ye may not quit your sweetness, in the Vine 

More firmly rooted than of old, your wine 
Hath freer flow ! ye have not changed, but grown 
To fuller stature ; though the shock was keen 
That severed you from us, how oft below 
Hath sorest parting smitten but to show 
True hearts their hidden wealth that quickly grow 
The closer for that anguish, — friend to friend 
Revealed more clear, — and what is Death to rend 
The ties of life and love, when He must fade 
In light of very Life, when He must bend 
To love, that, loving, loveth to the end ? 



INTRODUCTION, xxiii 

I do not deem ye look 
Upon us now, for be it that your eyes 
Are sealed or clear, a burden on them lies 

Too deep and blissful for their gaze to brook 
Our troubled strife ; enough that once ye dwelt 
Where now we dwell, enough that once ye felt 
As now we feel, to bid you recognize 
Our claim of kindred cherished though unseen ; 
And Love that is to you for eye and ear 
Hath ways unknown to us to bring you near, — 
To keep you near for all that comes between ; 
As pious souls that move in sleep to prayer. 
As distant friends, that see not, and yet share 
(I speak of what I know) each other's care. 
So may your spirits blend with ours ! above 
Ye know not haply of our state, yet Love 
Acquaints you with our need, and through a way 
More sure than that of knowledge — so ye pray ! 

And even thus we meet. 
And even thus we commune ! spirits freed 
And spirits fettered mingle, nor have need 
To seek a common atmosphere, the air 

Is meet for either in this olden, sweet. 
Primeval breathing of Man's spirit, — Prayer ! 

I give, in conclusion, a portion of one of her 
most characteristic poems, "The Reconciler.'* 

Our dreams are reconciled. 
Since Thou didst come to turn them all to Truth ; 



xxiv INTRODUCTION. 

The World, the Heart, are dreamers in their youth 

Of visions beautiful, and strange and wild; 
And Thou, our Life's Interpreter, dost still 
At once make clear these visions and fulfil ; 
Each dim sweet Orphic rhyme. 
Each mythic tale sublime 
Of strength to save, of sweetness to subdue. 

Each morning dream the few. 
Wisdom's first lovers told, if read in Thee comes true. 
• • • • • 

Thou, O Friend 
From heaven, that madest this our heart Thine own. 
Dost pierce the broken language of its moan — 
Thou dost not scorn our needs, but satisfy ! 
Each yearning deep and wide. 
Each claim, is justified ; 
Our young illusions fail not, though they die 

Within the brightness of Thy Rising, kissed 
To happy death, like early clouds that lie 

About the gates of Dawn, — a golden mist 
Paling to blissful white, through rose and amethyst. 

The World that puts Thee by. 
That opens not to greet Thee with Thy train. 

That sendeth after Thee the sullen cry, 
** We will not have thee over us to reign " ; 
Itself doth testify through searchings vain 
Of Thee and of its need, and for the good 
It will not, of some base similitude 
Takes up a taunting witness, till its mood. 



INTRODUCTIOK xxv 

Grown fierce o'er failing hopes, doth rend and tear 
Its own illusions grown too thin and bare 
To wrap it longer ; for within the gate 
Where all must pass, a veiled and hooded Fate 
A dark Chimera, coiled and tangled lies. 
And he who answers not its questions dies, — 
Still changing form and speech, but with the same 
Vexed riddles, Gordian-twisted, bringing shame 
Upon the nations that with eager cry 
Hail each new solver of the mystery ; 

Yet he, of these the best. 

Bold guesser, hath but prest 
Most nigh to Thee, our noisy plaudits wrong ; 

True Champion, that hast wrought 

Our help of old, and brought 
Meat from this eater, sweetness from this strong. 

O Bearer of the key 
That shuts and opens with a sound so sweet 
Its turning in the wards is melody. 
All things we move among are incomplete 
And vain until we fashion them in Thee ! 
We labor in the fire. 

Thick smoke is round about us, through the din 
Of words that darken counsel clamors dire 

Ring from thought's beaten anvil, where within 
Two Giants toil, that even from their birth 
With travail-pangs have torn their mother Earth, 
And wearied out her children with their keen 
Upbraidings of the other, till between 
2 



xxvi INTRODUCTION. 

Thou earnest, saying, '* Wherefore do ye wrong 

Each other ? — ye are Brethren." Then these twain 

Will own their kindred, and in Thee retain 

Their claims in peace, because Thy land is wide 

As it is goodly ! here they pasture free. 

This lion and this leopard, side by side, 

A little child doth lead them with a song ; 

Now, Ephraim's envy ceaseth, and no more 

Doth Judah anger Ephraim chiding sore. 

For one did ask a Brother, one a King, 

So dost Thou gather them in one, and bring — 

Thou, King forevermore, forever Priest, 

Thou, Brother of our own from bonds released — 

A Law of Liberty, 

A Service making free, 
A Commonweal where each has all in Thee. 



And not alone these wide. 
Deep-planted yearnings, seeking with a cry 
Their meat from God, in Thee are satisfied ; 
But all our instincts waking suddenly 
Within the soul, like infants from their sleep 
That stretch their arms into the dark and weep. 
Thy voice can still. The stricken heart bereft 
Of all its brood of singing hopes, and left 
'Mid leafless boughs, a cold, forsaken nest 
With snow-flakes in it, folded in thy breast 
Doth lose its deadly chill ; and grief that creeps 
Unto thy side for shelter, finding there 



INTRODUCTION. xxvii 

The wound's deep cleft, forgets its moan, and weeps 
Calm, quiet tears, and on thy forehead Care 
Hath looked until its thorns, no longer bare. 
Put forth pale roses. Pain on thee doth press 
Its quivering cheek, and all the weariness. 
The want that keep their silence, till from Thee 
They hear the gracious summons, none beside 
Hath spoken to the world-worn, '^ Come to me," 
Tell forth their heavy secrets. 

Thou dost hide 
These in thy bosom, and not these alone. 
But all our heart's fond treasure that had grown 
A burden else : O Saviour, tears were weighed 
To Thee in plenteous measure ! none hath shown 
That Thou didst smile ! yet hast Thou surely made 
All joy of ours Thine own ; 

Thou madest us for Thine ; 
We seek amiss, we wander to and fro ; 
Yet are we ever on the track Divine ; 
The soul confesseth Thee, but sense is slow 
To lean on aught but that which it may see ; 
So hath it crowded up these Courts below 
With dark and broken images of Thee ; 
Lead Thou us forth upon Thy Mount, and show 
Thy goodly patterns, whence these things of old 
By Thee were fashioned ; One though manifold. 
Glass Thou thy perfect likeness in the soul. 
Show us Thy countenance, and we are whole ! 



xxviii INTR OD UCTION. 

No one, I am quite certain, will regret that 
I have made these liberal quotations. Apart 
from their literary merit, they have a special 
interest for the readers of "The Patience of 
Hope," as more fully illustrating the writer's 
personal experience and aspirations. 

It has been suggested by a friend, that it is 
barely possible that an objection may be urged 
against the following treatise, as against all 
books of a like character, that its tendency is 
to isolate the individual from his race, and 
to nourish an exclusive and purely selfish per- 
sonal solicitude ; that its piety is self-absorb- 
ent, and that it does not take sufficiently into 
account active duties and charities, and the 
love of the neighbor so strikingly illustrated 
by the Divine Master in his life and teachings. 
This objection, if valid, would be a fatal one. 
For, of a truth, there can be no meaner type 
of human selfishness than that afforded by 
him who, unmindful of the world of sin and 
suffering about him, occupies himself in the 
pitiful business of saving his own soul in the 
very spirit of the miser, watching over his 
private hoard while his neighbors starve for lack 
of bread. But surely the benevolent unrest, 
the far-reaching sympathies and keen sensitive- 
ness to the suffering of others, which so nobly 



INTRODUCTION. 



XXIX 



distinguish our present age, can have nothing to 
fear from a plea for personal holiness, patience, 
hope, and resignation to the Divine v^^ill. '' The 
more piety, the more compassion," says Isaac 
Taylor ; and this is true, if v^e understand by 
piety, not self-concentred asceticism, but the 
pure religion and undefiled v^hich visits the 
v^idow and the fatherless, and yet keeps itself 
unspotted from the world, — w^hich deals justly, 
loves mercy, and yet walks humbly before God. 
Self-scrutiny in the light of truth can do no 
harm to any one, least of all to the reformer and 
philanthropist. The spiritual warrior, like the 
young candidate for knighthood, may be none 
the worse for his preparatory ordeal of watching 
all night by his armor. 

Tauler in mediaeval times, and Woolman in 
the last century, are among the most earnest 
teachers of the inward life and spiritual nature 
of Christianity, yet both were distinguished for 
practical benevolence. They did not separate 
the two great commandments. Tauler strove 
with equal intensity of zeal to promote the tem- 
poral and the spiritual welfare of men. In the 
dark and evil time in which he lived, amidst the 
untold horrors of the " Black Plague, *' he 
illustrated by deeds of charity and mercy his 
doctrine of disinterested benevolence. Wool- 



XXX INTRODUCTION. 

man's whole life was a nobler " Imitation of 
Christ" than that fervid rhapsody of monastic 
piety which bears the name. 

How faithful, yet, withal, how full of kind- 
ness, were his rebukes of those who refused 
labor its just reward, and ground the faces of 
the poor ? How deep and entire was his sym- 
pathy with overtasked and ill-paid laborers ; 
with wet and ill-provided sailors, with poor 
wretches blaspheming in the mines, because 
oppression had made them mad ; with the dyers 
plying their unhealthful trade to minister to 
luxury and pride ; with the tenant wearing out 
his life in the service of a hard landlord ; and 
with the slave sighing over his unrequited toil ! 
What a significance there was in his vision of 
the " dull, gloomy mass " which appeared be- 
fore him, darkening half the heavens, and which 
he was told was " human beings in as great 
misery as they could be and live ; and he was 
mixed with them, and henceforth he might not 
consider himself a distinct and separate being " ! 
His saintliness was wholly unconscious ; he 
seems never to have thought himself any nearer 
to the tender heart of God than the most miser- 
able sinner to whom his compassion extended. 
As he did not live, so neither did he die to him- 
self. His prayer upon his death-bed was for 



INTRODUCTION. xxxi 

others rather than himself; its beautiful humility 
and simple trust were marred by no sensual 
imagery of crowns and harps and golden streets, 
and personal beatific exaltations ; but tender 
and touching concern for suffering humanity, 
relieved only by the thought of the paternity of 
God, and of his love and omnipotence, alone 
found utterance in ever-memorable words.* 

In view of the troubled state of the country, 
and the intense preoccupation of the public 
mind, I have had some hesitation in offering 
this volume to its publishers. But, on further 
reflection, it has seemed to me that it might 
supply a want felt by many among us ; that, in 
the chaos of civil strife, and the shadow of 
mourning which rests over the land, the con- 

* ** O Lord, my God ! the amazing horrors of darkness were 
gathered about me, and covered me all over, and I saw no way to 
go forth 5 / felt the depth and extent of the misery of my fclloiv- 
creatures separated from the Di'vine harmony y and it ivas greater 
than I could bear, and I ivas crushed doivn under it ; I lifted up 
my handy I stretched out my arm, but there ivas none to help me ; I 
looked round about, and was amazed. In the depths of misery, 
O Lord, / remembered that Thou art omnipotent ; that I had called 
thee Father ,* and I felt that I loved thee ; and I was niade quiet 
in my will, and waited for deliverance from thee. Thou hadst 
pity upon me, when no man could help me ; I saw that meekness 
under suffering was showed to us in the most affecting example 
of thy Son j and thou taught me to follow him, and I said, * Thy 
will, O Father, be done!'" 



xxxii INTRODUCTION. 

templation of "things unseen which are eter- 
nal " might not be unwelcome ; that, when the 
foundations of human confidence are shaken, 
and the trust in man proves vain, there might 
be glad listeners to a voice, calling from the 
outward and the temporal, to the inward and 
the spiritual ; from the troubles and perplexities 
of time, to the eternal quietness which God 
giveth. I cannot but believe that, in the heat 
and glare through which we are passing, this 
book will not invite in vain to the calm, sweet 
shadows of holy meditation, grateful as the 
green wings of the bird to Thalaba in the 
desert ; and thus afford something of consola- 
tion to the bereaved, and of strength to the 
weary. For surely never was the " Patience 
of Hope " more needed ; never was the inner 
sanctuary of prayer more desirable ; never was 
a steadfast faith in the Divine goodness more 
indispensable, nor lessons of self-sacrifice and 
renunciation, and that cheerful acceptance of 
known duty which shifts not its proper respon- 
sibility upon others, nor asks for "peace in 
its day" at the expense of purity and justice, 
more timely than now, when the solemn words 
of ancient prophecy are as applicable to our 
own country as to that of the degenerate Jew,-^ 
" Thine own wickedness shall correct thee, and 



INTRODUCTION. xxxiii 

thy backsliding reprove thee ; know, therefore, 
it is an evil thing, and bitter, that thou hast 
forsaken the Lord, and that my fear is not in 
thee," — when " His way is in the deep, in 
clouds, and in thick darkness," and the hand 
heavy upon us which shall "turn and overturn 
until he whose right it is shall reign," — until, 
not without rending agony, the evil plant which 
our Heavenly Father hath not planted, whose 
roots have wound themselves about altar and 
hearthstone, and whose branches, like the tree 
Al-Accoub in Moslem fable, bear the accursed 
fruit of oppression, rebellion, and all imaginable 
crime, shall be torn up and destroyed forever. 

J. G. W. 

Amesbury, ist €th mo.| 1861. 




2* 



Part First. 



** He shall grow up as a tender plant, 
As a root out of dry ground.** 

Isaiah liii. 2. 



<WS> 



The Patience of Hope, 



PART I. 




N Jesus Christ all contradictions are 
reconciled ; yet in Him, also, and in 
all that is connected with his person 
and office, we are met by a strange 
contradiction, — a clashing of opposing attri- 
butes, " Who is this that cometh from Edom, 
with dyed garments from Bozrah, glorious in 
his apparel, travelling in the greatness of his 
strength? He who hath trodden down the 
people in his wrath, and trampled upon them 
in his ftiry." Is this one with Him the Man 
of sorrows and of humiliation, of silence and 
long-suffering, despised of men and rejected, 
giving his back to the smiters, and his cheeks 
to them that plucked off the hair? Is this Lord 
to whom the Lord hath spoken, " Sit thou on 
my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy 
footstool," Him concerning whom God speaks 



38 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

thus comfortably unto Zion, " Behold, thy King 
Cometh, meek, having salvation, lowly, riding 
upon an ass, and a colt the foal of an ass"? 
is He, the upholder of the bruised reed, one 
with Him who shall bruise the nations with a 
rod of iron, and dash them in pieces hke a 
potter's vessel ? is the Interceder one with the 
Avenger ? the Lamb that taketh away the sins 
of the world, one with Him whose wrath a 
guilty world shall not be able to abide ? 

" Kiss the Son, lest he be angry." Can we 
wonder that some among the Jews should have 
imagined there would be two Messiahs, — the 
suffering one and the triumphant ? And what 
is the Incarnation, but the fulfilment of these 
mighty, yet contending predictions ? What is 
the hfe of our Lord and Saviour upon earth but 
the conflict of glory and humiliation ? " The 
birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise " : glori- 
ous in fact, yet of ambiguous circumstance ; of 
kingly descent, yet lowly parentage ; born in the 
appointed city, yet called a Nazarene ; cradled 
in a manger, yet worshipped even there by sage 
and monarch ; dying a death of ignominy, yet 
even upon the Cross, in Hebrew and Greek 
and Latin, — the three living, ruhng tongues of 
time, — proclaimed to be a King and a Saviour. 
*' This is Jesus " / possessed through life of 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 39 

boundless resources, and exerting them on be- 
half of others, yet himself submitting to the 
ordinary conditions of the Humanity he had 
taken upon him ; hungering, thirsting, wearied, 
in all things choosing to be made like unto his 
brethren ; Lord of nature and of time, yet wait- 
ing upon the restraints they impose ; overcom- 
ing death, yet obedient to that which he over- 
came. " He saved others, himself he cannot 
save." 

And as with the Master, so with them that 
are of his Household. The history of the 
Christian Church is a hieroglyph or picture- 
writing, to which the life of Jesus Christ on 
earth is as it were the Rosetta stone, making, 
wTien once mastered^ all the rest plain. The 
present aspect of the Church, its past history, 
the records of individual Christian experience, 
offer us many sorrowful problems ; but how 
was it in the days when the Word was made 
flesh and dwelt among us, and man leheld God's 
glory, full of grace and truth ? Was there not 
even then something which corresponds with 
what we now see and feel ? — the final and 
absolute contending with the temporal and 
accidental, and often apparently overcome by 
them; lofty principles out of harmony with 
the things which surround them, — delay, vicis- 



40 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

situde, incompleteness, — ''the something still 
which prompts the eternal sigh." Is there not 
now in Christ something which corresponds 
with what we trace in the Gospel narrative ; 
something, I say, which disappoints an apparent- 
ly reasonable hope like that of the devout * Jews 
for the temporal Messiah ; disappoints it to fiilfil 
it far more gloriously, more completely, yet in 
a way that contradicts our natural expectations. 
Even then, as now, did Christ delay, withdraw, 
even hide himself from those that loved and 
followed him, " a deceiver, and yet true." 

The history of Divine grace in the heart and 
in the world is illustrated by the book which 
St. John received from the angel, sweet to the 
taste, bitter in the working. Is it the Jew only 
who looks in Christ for the temporal deliverer, 
the restorer of paths to dwell in, the bringer 
again, like David, of all that the enemy hath 
carried away ? What finder of Jesus is there 
who has not in his first joy exclaimed, with St. 
Andrew, " We have found the Messias, that is 
the Christ " ? What follower of Jesus is there 
who does not learn, as did those first brethren, 
that " He must be followed to prison and to 
death"? 

* It is difficult, perhaps, for a Christian to place himself at 
the point of view they occupied so as to see how reasonable this 
hope was. 




THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 41 

When Jesus says to his disciples, " In the 
world ye shall have tribulation,'"" he speaks from 
insight rather than foresight *; as one who, know- 
ing what was the heart of man, sees in himself 
the bringer of a sword within it, that shall never 
leave it until all things concerning him are ful- 
filled. 

Let us consider this, — that when Christ took 
our nature upon him, he took it as it was ; he did 
not re-create before assuming it, but assumed it 
in order to its re-creation, so that, being found in 
fashion as a man, he brought himself into con- 
nection, yet into colHsion, with weakness, with 
error, with decay, witJi all that belongs to man. 
The conflict of Christianity is the harder be- 
cause it is civil ; it has allied itself with that 
against which it must contend to the death, or 
be itself overcome of it. Hence its fierce col- 
lisions, its sorrowful victories ; hence too its still 
more sad, more fatal compromises, its unholy, 
unhallowing aUiances, " the Woman sitting upon 
the Beast,"* — the compact between the Clmrch 
and the World, at the sight of which he who 
had learnt so many secrets from his beloved 
Master, yet " wondered with great admiration." 
And if the world itself is a field too narrow for 
the meeting-shock of such antagonists as grace 

* See Williams on the Apocalypse. 



42 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

and nature, how fares it in the conflict of whicn 
all that passes in the outward Church is but the 
history " writ large " ; when these two, con- 
trary the one to the other, meet and wrestle 
within the heart as those who contend, not for 
mastery, but for hfe itself? Woe, in this battle, 
to the vanquished ! woe also to the victor ! 
*' For every battle of the warrior is with con- 
fused noise, and garments rolled in blood, but 
this shall be with burning and fuel of fire." 

Ellis tells us that during his stay in Madagas- 
car he was visited by a native of rank, himself 
friendly to Christianity, and who had suffered 
deeply in his family relations in the persecution 
through which, as through a fiery and bloody 
dawn, its light so lately broke upon that island. 
This man looked at the brother missionaries 
long and earnestly, when, after almost mechani- 
cally giving them his hands, there came over 
his countenance, Ellis says, " an expression such 
as I have never witnessed in any human being ; 
an intensity of feeling, neither ecstasy nor terror, 
but an apparent blending of both ; while during 
the whole interview, which was long, there was 
a strange uneasiness mingled with an evident 
satisfaction,'^^ Was there not here, even in the 
twilight of faith and reason, a recognition of 
Christ and of all that he comes to work ? an 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 43 

intuition in this half-enlightened, half-instructed 
soul of what remains long hidden from Christ's 
wise and prudent ones, — the stern necessity of 
the Christian covenant, that Christ in his mem- 
bers, as once aforetime in his human person, 
should suffer many tilings before he can enter 
into his glory ? It is hard for Humanity to re- 
ceive this lesson, to accept this inevitable condi- 
tion of its initiation into its true life, — the laying 
down of that very life^ that we may receive it again 
in Christ, Hard for us, as it was for the first 
disciples, even with Christ our Master going 
"before us" on the foreseen path, to understand 
him when he speaks of suffering, of humilation, 
of death itself, shortly to be accomplished. Here 
too, upon the way, will there be reasonings, 
surmisings, something too within the heart 
which, with the ardent spirit of St. Peter, will 
resist, even rebuke the teaching of its beloved 
Lord ; which will say unto him, " Be this far 
from Thee." For what is this which Christ 
demands from his disciple ? Even that which he 
himself gave, "Sacrifice and meat-offering thou 
wouldest not, neither hadst pleasure therein." 
The idea of propitiation, or the giving up of 
something which we hold least precious in order 
that we may retain that which we prize most of 
all, upon which the sacrifices under the old law 



44 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

and those of all natural religions are founded, 
finds no place in the Christian Covenant. For 
to confirm this between God and man, the most 
precious thing of all was offered^ and was ac- 
cepted ; " He taketh away the first, that he may 
establish the second." 

And thus it is necessary that this Man also 
should have something to offer. The need of 
sacrifice is not taken away, only its nature is 
changed, exalted, deepened ; and mild as is the 
genius of the New Dispensation, its knife goes 
closer to the heart than that of the elder one, 
which we are accustomed to think of as so stern 
and exacting. Behold the goodness and sever- 
ity of Christ 1 " Skin for skin," saith Job of 
old ; " all that a man hath will he give for his 
life." And it is this very life which Christ 
asks us to lay down for him ; this life of which 
he tells us, that he who loveth it shall lose it, 
and he who loseth it for his sake, shall keep it 
unto life eternal. 

And when we speak in a spiritual sense of 
Life, the laying it down and taking it again, we 
speak not of mere existence, but of that which 
is to every one of us the root by which we hold ; 
that which is to each individual heart confessed- 
ly " no vain thing, for it is our life." Take it 
aw^ay, and all beside is gone ; " for in the blood 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 45 

is the life " ; in the affections, in the energies 
which send their sap through the whole think- 
ing, feeling being. And it is to the root of this 
tree of man's life, wrapped round with its most 
intimate fibres, — even this, be it what it may, 
for which we would give, for which we would 
forego, all the world beside, — the will of man, 
— that the axe of Christ is laid. 

The disciple must be as his master, the ser- 
vant as his lord. Why was the sacrifice of 
Christ's death so pre-eminently meritorious, so 
infinitely prevaihng with God ? why do the 
sacred writers attribute an efficacy to it which 
it was impossible that the sufferings of uncon- 
scious though innocent victims could possess ? 
Because, to say nothing of the intrinsic value of 
this sacrifice, it was, above all others that have 
been ever offered, a free, conscious, and will- 
ing one. The Man Christ Jesus was, of all 
created beings, — as far as we know their his- 
tory, — the only one who chose his own destiny, 
who foreknew and accepted its full conditions ; 
who saw a great need, and responded to it, 
" Lo ! I come." " My leave," said the acute 
Frenchwoman, '' was not asked before I came 
into the world," — a saying in which all that 
the human heart can urge against God and his 
appointments lies hid. Why should I be called 



46 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

apon to endure, to forego so much ? Had the 
choice been permitted me, I might possibly have 
dechned it. Our Saviour^ s leave was asked. His 
fulfilment of his Father's will was voluntary ; he 
saw the end from the beginning ; saw it even in 
the beginning^ and walked onwards to that end, 
seeing his own destiny and feeling his own free- 
dom. " I have power," he says, '' to lay down 
my life, and I have power to take it again." 

But how is Christ's follower to obtain this 
freedom? How is this great transfer, lying at 
the very heart of our spiritual life, the exchange 
of our own will for a better one, to be effected 
for a being like Man, impelled alike by the 
weakness and the strength of his whole nature 
to cleave unto the dust from whence he was 
at first taken ? At this point we must pause a 
moment, feeling that our subject has drawn us 
into a desolate, even awful region, where, like 
the traveller high up among the mountains, we 
would fain hold the breath and hurry onwards, 
lest a word too lightly spoken should bring down 
the impending avalanche. For all thoughts that 
lead us from the circumference of faith to its 
centre draw us insensibly, and with a force that 
becomes irresistible the nearer we approach that 
centre, to the sacrifice of the death of Christ. 
Motus rerum est rajpidus extra locum, pladdus 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE, 47 

in loco. There is no rest for the soul of the 
beHever till it settles forever on this magnet. 
No rest ; I would say, also, no progress for the 
soul until it receives within it this great Motive 
Power ; receives it not only as a fulfilled fact, 
but accepts it in its boundless consequences, and 
recognizes as first among them that of its own 
" baptism unto his death." The disciple is not 
above his master, neither is the servant above 
his Lord ; nevertheless^ every one that is perfect 
shall he as his master. O blessed saying! O 
promise hke unto that made to the two chosen 
disciples, " Ye shall indeed drink of my cup " ; 
and what if our Lord's cup should prove to be 
the cup of vinegar mingled with gall, it is none 
the less the cup of blessing and of full, unre- 
served communion. " Kiss me with the kisses 
of thy mouth, for thy love is better than wine." 

And it is our personal initiation into this 
mystery of sacrifice which is, as regards the life 
which is in Christ Jesus, its true sacrament, 
enabling the soul to pass into real and intimate 
communion with him. Christ our Passover has 
been long slain for us ; but how do his people, 
for the most part, keep the feast ? By way of 
commemoration only. 

But it is they w^ho eat of the sacrifices, and 
they only, who are partakers of the Altar. It 



48 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

is not enougli that we show forth our Lord's 
death until his coming again ; to draw out the 
depths of this great act of love, we must so 
unite ourselves to it as to learn what St. Paul 
meant when he spoke of filling up that which 
was behind of the sufferings of Christ. It is the 
bearing of the cross, the sharing of the passion, 
that enables the believer to meet and understand 
his Lord ; " for we being many, are one Body," 
and without participation there can be no com- 
munion. 

All that are in Christ must be made to drink 
into one Spirit, yet often and often perhaps must 
He return and ask his chosen ones, " Are ye 
able to drink of my cup ? " before that free, calm 
answer can be given, " We are able " ; and 
many offerings must be laid upon his altar with 
tears and weeping before the sacrifices of joy are 
brought there. For as Christ was made like 
unto us, we must he made like unto him^ even at 
the cost of much that is grievous to natural feel- 
ing. His coming within the soul is the bring- 
ing in of a new order ; and when was there a 
painless transition, a bloodless revolution ? It 
gives a new aim to the will of man ; it sets a 
fresh goal before his affections, and one oft- 
times to be reached only by passing over the 
dead body of all that made up their former life. 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 49 

*' Who will lead me into the strong city ? who 
will bring me into Edom ? " Before Christ can 
gain the citadel of Man's will and affections, 
many pleasant places must be laid waste before 
him, many fair and flourishing outworks be 
brought low. These are hard sayings, and if 
they are met by the rejoinder, WTio can bear 
them ? the answer is already written. They to 
whom they are addressed hy Christy and they ordy^ 
" He who forsaketh not all that he hath, cannot 
be my disciple." Christ does not say he cannot 
be my servant, does not say he cannot be my 
son, but he cannot be my disciple. There are 
many gains, many losses in Christ, over and 
above that great, inappreciable loss of the salva- 
tion of the soul in him. This final aim may be 
attained, and yet the hearers who, for love of a 
great or of a small possession, depart upon that 
saying, " Sell that thou hast, and follow me," 
may have abundant reason for going away sor- 
rowful. We are made poor by what we miss, as 
well as by what we lose ; * a little more patience, 

* You say in one of your letters, " I feel a solemn pathos in 
the lament which the Lord takes up over the defection of his 
people: ' that my people had hearkened unto me, that Israel 
had walked in my ways ! I should soon have subdued their ene- 
mies, and turned my hand against their adversaries ' ; and after 
this follows, ' I should have fed them with the finest wheat flour, 
and with honey out of the stony rock should I have satisfied 
them.* And what, but for a like failure in perseverance might 
3 D 



60 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

a little more constancy, and to what might we 
not have attained ! to what tender intimacy, to 
what satisfying communications, to what power, 
what rest, what freedom! 

The more clearly we follow Christ, the more 
perseveringly do certain truths present them- 
selves to us, — truths with which we commune, 
but dare not for a while receive in their full 
import, because we know they would lead us 
whither we would not. Yet they come again 
and again, offering themselves to us, like the 
Sibyl of old, each time under harder conditions, 
till at last we accept them on their own terms, 
A Christian may love his Master truly, and be 
yet unprepared to follow him whithersoever he 
goeth. How can two walk in a way unless they 
be agreed ? and the enmity between Christ and 
nature is not yet so wholly slain but that there 
may be on the believer's part conscious shrink- 
ings and reservations : he knows that it would 
be hard to take this thing up ; hard, perhaps im- 
possible, to let this thing go, even at the com- 

have been our portion, * the finest of the wheat, and honey out 
of the rock,' and that EocJc, St. Paul tells us, was Christ. To 
hearken diligently unto him, to walk in his ways, is plainly point- 
ed out as the means through which we first obtain victory over 
our spiritual enemies, and then arrive at the feast of good things, 
prepared for those only who have come thus far. * I will bring 
them into my banqueting-house, where my banner over them 
shaU be love.' "— J. E. B. 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 51 

mand of Christ himself. This crisis of spiritual 
life, ftill of pain and perplexity, is one with 
which our Saviour may deeply sympathize, for 
he knoweth what is in Man ; yet it is none the 
less a temper which " is not worthy of Him." 
He does not trust himself to a divided heart, and 
of this the owner of such a heart is well aware. 
So that there arises within it a secret craving for 
whatever may detach and loosen these bonds, 
from which no effort of its own can free it, — 
a desire like that which St. Paul so fervently 
expresses for the fellowship of his Lord^s suffer- 
ings^ the conformity to his LorcCs deaths so that 
by any means it may attain to spiritual resurrec- 
tion with him. There comes a moment in 
which the soul, awaking up into the sense of 
the deep antagonism between grace and nature, 
will exclaim, as seeing no other way of deliver- 
ance, " Let us go unto Him^ that we may also 
die with him " ; let us know that we live in 
Christ, if it be through being sharers in his pain. 
" They were all baptized in the cloud and in 
the sea " ; this is the register of all Christ's 
chosen ones, the pledge of their initiation into 
that covenant " whose promises, whose rewards, 
whose very beatitudes are sufferings." Why 
does St. Paul so rejoice,* so delight himself in 

* Note A. 



52 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

weakness, in persecution, in affliction, but be- 
cause he knows that without these he can attain 
to no close intimacy with his beloved Lord? 
And if this be a sore lesson, is it not one for 
which the heart may be in some degree pre- 
pared, even by its own natural experience? Do 
not trials and sorrows (also, it is true, deep joys) 
shared between two friends, partings, dangers, 
above all, the having stood together in the pres- 
ence of death, deepen the channel of our affec- 
tion in deepening that of our existence ? Are 
not such moments as it were sacramental, bring- 
ing us nearer each other in bringing us nearer 
God, from whom the poor unrealities of time, 
unworthy of us as they are of JSim^ too much 
divide us ? It is often through some keen, even 
desolating shock, the blasting of the breath of 
God's chiding, that the deep foundations of our 
nature are first discovered to us. When the 
veil of the temple, even this poor worn garment 
of our Humanity, is rent from the top to the 
bottom, we catch glimpses of the inner glory : 
the rocks are riven, the graves open, they who 
have long slept in the dust come forth, and 
reveal to us awful and tender secrets, of which 
otherwise we should have known nothing. 
"They who love," as says St. Chrysostom, "if 
it be but man, not God," will know what 1 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 53 

mean, when I speak of joys springing out of 
the very heart of anguish, and holding to it 
by a common and inseparable life; will under- 
stand how it comes that the pale flowers which 
thrust themselves out of the ruins of hope, of 
endeavor, of affection, — yes, even out of the 
mournful wreck of intellect itself, — should 
breathe out a deep and intimate fragrance, such 
as the broad wealth of air and sunshine never 
yet gave, — 

" For in things 
That move past utterance, tears ope all their springs, 
Nor are there in the powers that all life hears 
More true interpreters of all than tears^ 

It needs but a little consideration to perceive 
that devotion, self-sacrifice, all the higher moods 
and energies even of natural feeling, are only 
possible to seasons of adversity. " Deep calleth 
unto deep." We need not look far into Man's 
nature to see that its true wealth does not lie 
so near the surface, but that the smooth, grassy 
levels of prosperity hide riches such as only a 
shock can develop. The history of both nations 
and churches shows us how the very strain and 
pressure of calamity can force up social existence 
to an otherwise unimaginable height of noble- 
ness ; but we must look yet deeper than this, 
to understand the strange affinity which Chris- 
tianity has at all times betrayed with whatever 



54 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

is most contradictory to natural feeling, making 
it to choose pain and weakness and infirmity as 
its natural soil and climate. And here experi- 
ence, rather than reason, must be our guide ; for 
what is there in pain, considered in itself, that is 
purifying, far less ennobling ? Its connection 
with all that is most precious to Christian life 
is incidental rather than inherent, and is to be 
traced to that deep original wound of our nature 
which has set the ideals of Christ and Humanity 
so far apart, that the wealth of the one can only 
be attained through the minishing of the other. 
If the house of David is to wax stronger, the 
house of Saul must wax weaker from day to day. 
And hence it is that every fuller development 
of Christ's spirit within man necessarily takes a 
self-subduing character, making asceticism under 
one form or other inseparable from the true 
Christian Hfe. For the glory of the terrestrial is 
one, the glory of the celestial is another. The 
triumph of Nature lies in the carrying out of 
its own will, in identification with some great 
object, in adhesion to some lofty aim. The 
triumph of Christ is placed in the subjugation 
of that very will, in acquiescence, in disen- 
tanglement; in the stretching forth of the 
hands, so that another may gird us and carry 
us whither we would not.* 

* Note B. 



m 






THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 55 

The character which Christ forms within the 
heart is one at variance with our ideas of natu- 
ral greatness ; His rule opposes itself as much 
to the higher as to the lower instincts of nature. 
And that this should have been most clearly- 
seen by thinkers looking at Christianity from 
without, ought not to make us careless of the 
truths they disclose ; for intellectual and spiritual 
contemplation alike lead up to clear, calm sum- 
mits, and upon them are strange meetings un- 
dreamt of by the dwellers in the valleys and 
the plains below. The keen intuition of the 
Thinker places him in possession of truths which 
the lowly Christian has learned upon his knees ; 
and though these two may distrust and be mutu- 
ally repelled from each other, they have none 
the less a common standing-ground, — 
" Their speech is one, their witnesses agree." 
The sober Christian may possibly feel a shock 
in finding Novalis describe his faith as a foe " to 
art, to science, even to enjoyment " ; yet does 
not his own daily experience prove that the 
holding of the one thing needful involves the 
letting go of many things lovely and desirable, 
and that in thought, as well as in action, he 
must go on '' ever narrowing his way, avoiding 
mueh^^?^ And this, not because his intellect 
* W. B. Scott. 



56 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

is darkened to perceive beauty and excellence, 
or his affections dulled to embrace them, but 
because human life and human capacity are 
bounded things ; the heart can be devoted but 
to one object, and the winning of the great 
prizes of earthly endeavor asks for an intensity 
of purpose, which in the Christian has found 
another centre. 

And more than this, the rule of Christ is not 
only exclusive but restrictive, and though it 
would carry us among too wide and distant 
fields to enter upon this subject as it deserves, 
we need not look far into either literature or art 
to see to how many of their happiest energies 
this rule opposes itself. Their spirit is a free 
spirit, impatient of any yoke. How much, for 
instance, of the greatness of Shakespeare and 
Goethe consists in a wide NaturaHsm, which, 
as it were, finds room within it for all things, 
not only depicting them, but in some measure 
delighting in them, as they are. Could this 
genial abandonment coexist with a deepened 
moral consciousness, far less, surely, with the 
simplicity and severity of Christ ? 

Again : to a person who has seen in Chris- 
tianity a certain engaging moral and social as- 
pect, and has not looked into it much deeper, 
what Goethe says of it as being " founded upon 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 67 

the reverence for that which is beneath us, the 
veneration of the hated, the contradictory, and 
the avoided," will appear perverse and one- 
sided. Yet not so, surely, to him who has 
been accustomed to recognize his Lord's features 
in those of the forlorn, the ignorant, and the de- 
spised, — to him who has found that the print of 
his Master's footsteps, if tracked with any degree 
of faithfulness, will carry his own far out of the 
path of pleasure and distinction, and leave him 
amid scenes and among objects in which, save 
for this powerful attraction, he would have found 
nothing to delight in or to desire. For Chris- 
tianity, though it may at certain periods and 
in certain persons reveal itself under a splendid 
and engaging aspect, so as to command the 
homage * of the world with which it is at vari- 
ance, remains true to its first conditions, begin- 
ning at Bethlehem, " small among the cities of 
Judah," and ending upon Calvary between the 
two thieves. Whenever it has been joined, as it 
has been joined so often, with the pomp and 
riches and glory of this world, this has been but 
a State-alliance, from which its heart has fled, to 
the cell of the lonely monk, to the workshop of 
the humble artisan, to some little band of perse- 
cuted men, — to such as, whether solitary or in 

families, — 

3* ^NoteC. 



68 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

" Loving Jesus for his own sake," 

have been content for his sake to be men won- 
dered at.* How many of the sparks at which 
great fires have been kindled, even now enhght- 
ening and warming the world, have been struck 
from the hearts and brains of men counted fools 
and fanatics in their own generation ! Christ is 
favorable to the simple and needy. When we 
look into His kingdom, we see that many of 
its mightiest enterprises, now ripening to evident 
perfection, have been begun by a few gathered 
together in his name, and these few, perhaps, 
neither wise nor rich nor noble. Yet even 
now, as during our Lord's life on earth, all the 
lowliness of his aspect does not conceal the lofti- 
ness of his claims, nor blind the world to the 

* " He who far off beholds another dancing, 
Even he who dances best, and all the time 
Hears not the music that he dances to, 
Thinks him a madman, apprehending not 
The law which moves his else eccentric motion; 
So he that 's in himself insensible 
Of love's sweet influence misjudges him 
Who moves according to love's melody. 
And knowing not that all these sighs and tears, 
Ejaculations and impatiences. 
Are necessary changes of a measure 
Which the divine musician plays ^ may call 
The lover crazy, which he would not do, 
Did he within his own heart hear the tune 
Played by the great musician of the world.^^ 

Calderon, translated by Fitzgerald. 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 69 

fact that these are the claims of one who, com- 
ing in to sojourn, has made himself altogether 
a ruler and a judge over it. " Whom makest 
thou thyself? " it will still ask. And this ques- 
tion will be followed by a demand, prompted by 
kindred enmity, " Why makest thou us to 
doubt ? if thou be the Christ, show thyself 
openly." 

And there is much, truly, in the condition of 
the Church since our Saviour left it to remind 
us of the plant Linnaeus speaks of, — perfect in 
its structure, yet showing neither fruit nor blos- 
som above the earth, though it puts forth many 
beneath it, blanched from the darkness of their 
life. "It doth not yet appear what we shall 
be." Humanity, even at the voice of Christ, 
comes forth bound hand and foot with grave- 
clothes, and as one that hath been dead four 
days. Therefore we need not wonder if in such 
a resurrection there should be paroxysms ; if 
there should be in every great awakening unto 
Christ something to give room for the scoffings 
of the profane, the doubts and surmisings of the 
prudent. Christ does not at once remove the 
enmity which he finds. He must first bind the 
strong man ; and before the strength of nature 
is subdued and disciplined to carry out the 
behests of grace, there is a struggle, — revealing 



60 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

itself among the poor of Christ's flock, unused to 
restrain or analyze their own emotions, in forms 
which may appear strange and exceptionable, 
but from which, under one form or another, 
none in whose spirit Christ lives can escape. 
For the heart and the world, until renewed 
after His likeness, are still heathen in all but in 
name ; exorcism must precede baptism, and the 
baptism from our Lord's hand is that wherewith 
he himself was baptized, — signed with the sign 
of the crossJ^ 

And while these thoughts throw an incidental 
light upon much that is mysterious in our spirit- 
ual life, they draw us to the consideration of 
that deeper mystery which underlies it all, — the 
structure, the schematism of our faith, which 
reveals itself through the fair and often smiling 
surface of Christianity as the gray rock in some 
mountain district crowns every summit, and 
thrusts itself even through the sheep-covered 
slopes, in keen contrast with their peace and 
verdure. When man finds that, if he would do 
God's mil, however imperfectly, he must offer 
up this continual sacrifice, the sacrifice of his own 

* Adalbert, the martyred apostle of Prussia, slain by the fierce 
Wends, stretched forth both his arms in dying, saying, " Jesus, 
receive thou me," and fell with his face to the ground in the 
form of a crucifix, thus, Carlyle says, setting his mark upon that 
heathen country. 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 61 

will^ his thoughts are irresistibly carried to rest 
upon that One offering up of a higher than any- 
human will,* by which Christ has perfected for- 
ever them that are sanctified. The more deeply 
we feel the existing contradiction between God's 
will and that of his creature, the deeper becomes 
our sense of the need of somewhat to take it 
away, so that the heart draws near to a truth 
unapproachable by the intellect, — the necessary 
death of Christ. All things in nature, as well 
as all things in grace, point to a Redeemer, 
Nature struggles, but cannot speak ; she remains 
in bondage with her children, dumb like them, 
and beautiful. Humanity has found a voice ; 
but where, save for Christ, would she find an 
answer? She has showed him of her wound, 
her grievous, incurable hurt; and how has he 
consoled her ? Even by showing her His, — 
" Reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my 
side." 

And as the law was our schoolmaster to bring 
us to Christ, so does our daily experience be- 
come a school, teaching us the same deep lesson 
which the book of the Old Testament unfolds. 
The events of human life, and the great facts 
which revelation discloses, cast reciprocal light 
upon each other, so that the believer's course 

* See Hebrews x. 10. 



62 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

as he advances is ever instructing him, hke the 
Earher Dispensation, through hint and sign and 
shadow, in the mysteries on which all the visible 
dealings of God are grounded. 

We begin to see that the whole teaching of 
the human race by God is based, like the pro- 
phetic songs of the Old Covenant, upon a gigan- 
tic parallelism ; * that as the Type is not a mere 
Sign, but has a redl^ though unseen connection 
with the fact it shadows forth, so has that fact 
also its correlative lying deep in the nature of 
God and man, and testifying to the essential 
unity of those natures. And as through the 
awful imagery which, under the rites and cere- 
monies of the Old Dispensation, prefigured the 
stupendous event of Redemption, we discern a 
mighty underworking which threw these figures 
of sacrifice and atonement to the surface, and 
could not have appeared in any other ; so, as our 
Christian consciousness deepens, do the things 

* Note D. 

t Differing in this from a symbol, which, being merely an idea 
sTiowjij a species of shorthand or figure-writing, need possess, it is 
obvious, no other than an arbitrary connection with the thing it 
stands for. A rose, for instance, once adopted, for whatever 
reason, as the emblem of secrecy, always conveys that idea to 
the mind which, in the absence of any natural association be- 
tween the two things, has once received them in connection. 
But it is far otherwise with a Type, which is, as Warburton 
Bays, " a prophecy in action, one in nature with that which it 
represents." — See on this subject the Divine Legation, 9th Book. 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 63 

with which we are daily conversant take up a 
mute significance ; so does all in life, that once 
appeared without bearing on our higher desti- 
nies, begin to arrange itself in the pattern 
of heavenly things, " the pattern showed us in 
the mount." 

And though the great events of Incarnation 
and Redemption, casting light upon all that had 
gone before them, need themselves^* according 
to Gaussen's fine saying, to he illumined hy a 
light not yet risen^ though the Dispensation of 
glory has yet to illustrate that of grace, it is in 
the heart that the day-star must now arise. 

And in every believing heart, the gradual 
turning of that heart to Christ casts as it were 
an oblique light on the sacred revelations of 
Scripture, by awakening within it the sense of 
sin, the need of expiation, and the want of a 
better righteousness than our own to meet a 
standard which even man, when once renewed 
in aim and feeling, consciously aspires to. So 
that the heart accepts Christ because it needs 
him, even while the mind may be unable to 
receive him fully, because the orbit of this Star 
is so extended as to carry beyond it the sphere 
of human intelligence. '' For to this end Jesus 
Christ both died and suffered, and rose again, 

* Note E. 



64 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

that he might be Lord both of the hving and 
the dead." We know not upon how many 
points Redemption touches ; what unseen 
worlds, what unborn generations, what unde- 
veloped forms of being it embraces. We know 
not to what Warfare, to what Accomplish- 
ment, our Lord referred when he spoke those 
words, "It is finished." We know not, in short, 
as Butler says, what in the works and coun- 
sels of God are ends, and what means to a fur- 
ther end, or how what appears to us as final 
may be initial with Him. But we see enough 
around us, and within us, to show that it was 
necessary that Christ should suffer many things, 
and after that enter into his glory ; enough to 
learn that we shall find no higher thing above, 
shall pierce to no deeper thing below, than the 
Cross and its solemn and tender teachings. If 
we would climb up into heaven, it is there ; if 
we would go down into hell, it is there also. 
He alone among men who has clasped this great 
mystery of grief and love to his bosom sees, if it 
be as yet but through a glass darkly, how pain 
and love, yes, joy also, all things that have a 
living root in humanity come to bloom under its 
shadow. And how love that cannot die, and 
faith that grows to certainty, and hope that 
maketh not ashamed, root themselves about it, 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 65 

with all fair things that wither in life, and 
noble things for which it has no room. " I 
took," said Luther, "for the symbol of my 
theology, a seal on which I had engraven a 
cross with a heart in its centre ; the cross is 
black, to indicate the sorrows, even unto death, 
through which the Christian must pass, hut the 
heart preserves its natural color^ for the cross 
does not extinguish nature, it does not kill, but 
gives life. Justus fide vivet^ sed fide crucifixL 
The heart is placed in the midst of a white rose, 
which signifies the joy, peace, and consolation 
that faith gives ; but the rose is white^ and not red^ 
because it is not the joy and peace of the world, 
but that of spirits." 

" Whoso is wise will ponder these 
things, and he shall un- 
derstand the loving- 
kindness of the 1 
Lord." 



Show me more love, my dearest Lord, 

0, turn away thy clouded face ! 
Give me some secret look or word 

That may betoken love and grace; 
No day or time is black to me 
But that wherein I see not Thee ; 
Show me more love ; a clouded face 

Strikes deeper than an angry blow. 
Love me and kill me by thy grace, 

I shall not much bewail my woe. 
But even to be 

In heaven unloved of Thee 

Were hell in heaven for to see ; 
Then hear my cry, and help afford; 
Show me more love, my dearest Lord. 

Show me more love, my dearest Lord, 

I cannot think, nor speak, nor pray; 
Thy work stands still ; my strength is stored 

In Thee alone ; come away ! 
Show me thy beauties, call them mine, 
My heart and tongue will soon be thine* 
Show me more love, or if my heart 

Too common be for such a guest, 
Let thy good Spirit by its art 

Make entry and put out the rest. 
For 'tis thy nest; 

Then he *s of heaven possest 

That heaven hath in his breast. 
Then hear my cry, and help afiford; 
Show me more love, my dearest Lord I 



Part Second. 



And Joseph knew his brethren. 
But they knew not him.** 

Gen. xlii. 8. 



t4>9a^ 




PART 11. 

»HEN the Past and the Future cheat 
us, it is through a charm to which 
we consciously abandon ourselves: 
we know how much the landscape 
gains in each case from the atmosphere through 
w^hich we view it. But the Present is the true 
deceiver; its clear, cold daylight hides much, 
in appearing to conceal nothing from us, for it 
is possible to look at things so closely as not to 
see what they really are. We catch the mean 
detail ; we miss the grand, comprehensive out- 
line. We must stand farther off, so that we may 
see the whole. " When the great Athanasius 
lived on earth," says Pascal, " he did not appear 
in the light in which we now regard him ; he 
was only a man called Athanasius." Yet was 
the great Athanasius the true Athanasius. And 
even thus greatness ever stands among us, as 
" one whom we know not " ; know not, even 
because we think we know it so well. 



70 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE, 

And as of individuals, so of ages. It seems 
hard to be generous, not easy even to be just, 
to the times upon which our lot is cast. The 
very expression " our present day " conveys 
with it somewhat of disparagement, implying a 
contrast with other ages in whose very silence 
we find an eloquence rebuking the clamor that 
surrounds us. Yet much that we now look 
upon as prosaic, and perhaps decry as unreal, if 
read as history, would enchain our imaginations ; 
if spoken as prophecy, would stir our very souls. 
Future chroniclers will make it their wisdom to 
decipher the Runes we are now dinting, and 
will understand their import better than we who 
leave them on the rock. 

Ours is a sober enthusiasm, patient because it 
is so strong. A Work is set before the day we 
live in, a Necessity is laid upon it ; it sees and 
accepts its calling, content to labor in the thick 
smoke, and weary itself among the very fires 
of speculation. Let but our age apprehend a 
cause, or an idea, as worthy of its devotion, and 
it will not fail to be furnished with apostles, with 
confessors, yes, if need be, with martyrs ; so 
strong is the passion of its onward march, so 
steadfast the ardor of its perseverance. And 
thus in how many a fair and still extending 
region of human thought and labor we have 
already arrived 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 71 

" At the winning and the holding of a prize, 
The hope of which would have been once deemed madness." 

But with our spiritual and moral conquests 
it lias surely fared less brightly ; here, among 
many leaders, we have as yet no Columbus, 
" the naked pilot, promiser of kingdoms," be- 
stowing more than he had promised ; no proph- 
ets, such as science has been blessed with, who 
have lived to see the wonder of their dream 
surpassed by its sober interpretation. Yet ours 
is none the less an age of generous experi- 
ments, of failures more noble than the successes 
to which the world decrees a Triumph. How 
many laborers are now among us, literally water- 
ing God's garden with their foot ! — a holy and 
blessed work ; but one in which we must not 
forget that the country in which our work lies 
is a land rich in itself^ full of fountains and 
depths springing out of its own hills and valleys, 
" a land that drinketh water of the rain of 
heaven." You say to me in one of your letters, 
'^ We hear so much around us of doings, so 
much of Christian exertion and charitable en- 
deavor, that in witnessing the comparatively 
small result of much devoted labor, I have been 
led to believe that we work too much upon the 
surface. The waters of life lie below it, and 
few pierce deep enough to unlock them for them- 



72 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE, 

selves or others. Our endless external reforms 
are, after all, only channels, too often dry ones, 
while every believer in whom his Lord's promise 
has been fulfilled, ' I will be to him a well of 
water, springing up into everlasting Ufe,' is a 
fountain, hidden it may be to the eye, but dis- 
cernible in the greenness and moisture that sur- 
round it." 

We have more than enough of systems, of 
machinery, which, whether more or less perfect, 
will not go of itself. We may have done all 
that of ourselves we can do, and the moving 
spring may yet be wanting.* " The spirit of 
the living creature in the wheels^ 

And just where our national dread of enthu- 
siasm is the strongest, we have surely many 
enthusiasts among us ; soldiers who go upon a 
spiritual warfare at their own cost, and builders 
who expect with such materials as earth can 
furnish to reach even unto heaven. Yet God 
is a spirit, and Man is also a spirit, and all work 
that is done between God and Man must be 
done in the spirit, — must be wrought from the 
centre outwards. The life that lies at the cir- 
cumference of its guiding idea lies there but in 
faint outline, feebly drawn, like the outermost 
ripple on disturbed waters. We are anxious to 

* Ezekieli, 19, 20; x. 16, 17. 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 73 

spread the knowledge of God. This is our 
work^ the end to which Christian exertion is 
chiefly directed, but before we can pursue it to 
any true result, God must also work a work 
within us, upon the deepening of which the ex- 
tension of Christ's kingdom naturally, inevitably 
follows. For they who are rooted in the Lord 
will in him bud and blossom, and fill the face of 
the earth with fruit. All who have ever been 
strong for God, have been strong in Him^ and 
have known too, as Samson did, where the 
secret of their strength lay, — in a dependence 
out of which they would have been consciously 
weak, and as other men. The Church has 
always borne witness to this truth ; her every 
prayer and confession proves that she has seen 
how it is that which binds her to her Lord, that 
strengthens her in him, so that the chains which 
are about her neck have become " an ornament 
of grace upon her head." But here, too, she 
may take a lesson where her Lord has sent her 
to look for it. 

Even from this Generation. Full of faith and 
power in the resources of human energy, and 
in that faith and power working marvels, if it 
believed in God as firmly as it does in itself, 
the seed it would raise to serve Him would be 
of no degenerate stock, and the Church would 
4 



74 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

once more, as in the days of its youth, take up 
its ancient hero-song, sweeter than was ever 
earthly Saga. But are we as Christians what 
we are as men ? 

God has showed us earthly things, and we 
have believed. Man has taken his own meas- 
ure, and found it " the measure of an angel." * 
Human intelligence, once a bold guesser after 
unproven truth, has learned the extent of its 
own resources ; hence its sure, yet extended 
aims, and hence its glorious acquisitions. Opin- 
ions with us are rooted and seeded things, able 
to raise up the life which they contain within 
them. We embrace facts, not abstractions ; we 
live as men in the reality of that ivhich we specu- 
latively accept as true. But can we say this for 
ourselves as Christians ? Have we believed 
when God has showed us heavenly things, or 
yet taken the measure of a man in Christ? 
Are we as conversant with the Second Adam as 
with the First ; as familiar with the capabilities 
of the renewed spirit as with those of the liv- 
ing soul ? The facts of revelation are accepted. 
The Gospel is made the basis of law and of 
society ; it is a framework holding all together ; 
a code, like the great Roman one, upon which 
the medic^val world kept its hold so long after 

* E. B. Browning. 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 75 

the power and spirit of the empire were but a 
tradition. • . . . 

But how few among us are of it upholden. 
How few, fastening upon God through the aw- 
ful relations it discloses, can say from the deep 
and ground of the heart, " O Lord, hy these 
men live, and in them is the life of the Spirit." 
And thus a strange weariness overtakes us;* 

' * I leave these words as they were written. Yet, since then, 
even within the last few years, a change has come, far more grad- 
ually than is generally supposed, over the climate of the Chris- 
tian world; as if some mighty current, like the Gulf Stream, had 
set in, sending a warm breath across the universal Church, and 
breaking up the deadly ice of ages of unbelief and indifference. 
And though this change may be, and will be, accompanied with 
shocks and splittings, it is surely the prudent, not the wise Chris- 
tian, who will on this account withdraw himself from its wide, 
soul-enlarging influence. For it is evident that this is not a work 
of extension only ; in every community, and in every heart where 
God has already had a work, that work has been lately deepened. 
*' The river of God is full of water." He has not only sent rain 
upon the dwellings in the wilderness, but caused it to descend 
into furrows long since drawn. Experienced Christians are the 
natural guides and comforters of those whose hearts have been 
but lately made soft with the drops of heaven ; in every Pente- 
costal outpouring there is something to recall the deep uncon- 
scious truth of that saying, " These men are full of new wine " ; 
and it is their part to see that the wine is not spilled, neither the 
bottles marred. And while it is easy to cavil at the phenomena 
connected more or less remotely with this change, the fact, not to 
he affected by awyofthem^ remains, that a great moral and spiritual 
change is taking place at our very doors ; that the poor among 
men are rejoicing in their Maker; that multitudes of people are 
at this very moment lifting up praying hearts, and this, for no 
temporal blessing, no sectarian end, but simply for the clearer 



76 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

uneasy in onrselves, we do not find rest in God, 
and become aware of a deep question, underly- 
ing all the shallow ones that now vex the cur- 
rent of religious speculation. We feel, each 
one of us for himself, that the point at issue is 
still concerning " one Jesus," whether we shall 
say with the world that he is dead, or with 
Paul steadfastly affirm him to be alive, and still 
the resurrection of the spiritually dead, the life 
of them that believe. For human society is 
even now, as in the days when the Gospel was 
first preached, made up of Greeks enthralled by 
outward sense, of Jews resting in an outward 
law ; and out of the midst of these a people has 

light of Christ's Cross, the fuller manifestation of His Presence. 
*' I will hear, saith the Lord ; I will hear the heavens, and they 
shall hear the earth " ; the heart of man seems set upon attaining 
to this closer correspondence with his Maker, set, too, upon ob- 
taining it through the Man whom he hath sent. They who seek 
the Lord shall praise him. On all sides there is a sound of abun- 
dance of rain ; so that the Christian feels that, deep and many as 
may be the trials yet in store for the Church, it has turned over, 
perhaps forever, one leaf of sorrowful experience, that of its long 
ploughing in the cold, each laborer apart, and un communicating. 
The days of harvest are sultry and arduous, but the reapers work 
in bands, and are cheered by many a song: — 

" * Brother, take thy brothers with thee,* 
Speak the silver-winding brooklets 
To the mighty mountain torrent ; 
* Take us with thee to the ocean 
That with outstretched arms awaits us, — 
Oft, alas ! in vain awaits us. 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 77 

need to be yet more fully <ialled, to find Him 
who is the end of the law to every one that 
believeth : " Christ the power of God, and 
Christ the wisdom of God." 

Even now, said St. John, speaking of his own 
day, there are many Antichrists. Since then 
there have been many forms of denial, sundry 
kinds of spiritual death. Christ has long stood 
in this world's judgment-hall, and suffered many 
things from them that throng it. From age to 
age false witnesses have risen up, laying to his 
charge things that he knew not. He has heard 
the defaming of the multitude, and borne in his 
bosom the rebukes of many peoples long gath- 



For in sandy wastes we filter 
Drop by drop, until the sunbeams 
Drink our blood ; until some hillock 
Locks us to a pool. take us, 
Brother, with thee ! ' Then for answer 
Swells the Flood, and on its bosom 
Lifts its kindred, lifts and bears them 
In its rolling triumph down. 
Lands take Name, and cities Being 
From its ceaseless march; behind it 
Tower and turret rise ; upon it 
Float the goodly ships of cedar, 
Fair, with many a flying pennon 
Waving witness to its pride. 
Bearing in its joyful tumult^ 
Bearing still its brothers mth itj 
These its treasures, these its children^ 
To the waiting Father's heart,^* 



78 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

ered to the dust of silence. But the day of in- 
solent derision is over, and it is after another 
manner that we behold Christ rejected, and set 
at naught by this generation. We are met, 
comparatively speaking, by little direct opposi- 
tion to revealed religion ; its moral teaching is 
respected ; the sacred person of its Founder is 
held in reverence ; it is as a power that Chris- 
tianity is denied.* Our age has nothing in com- 
mon with the degrading scepticism of the past 
century, which cast its scorn up to God through 
the foul dishonoring of His image. We believe, 
as I have said, in Man ; and our noble and ten- 
der faith in Humanity is one which works by 
love, showing itself in persevering and arduous 
efforts after social amelioration. But here also 
we may find a fulfilment of our Lord's saying, — 

* The lightest leaf will show the way the wind is setting, and 
I know not where we are met by a plainer expression of this 
tacit, and in some degree respectful denial, than in the popular 
literature of our day. Here we see a systematic ignoring of 
Christianity, combined with a rather inconsistent exaltation of 
the benevolent aspect peculiarly belonging to it. We find in such 
writings many flowers to please us, but see that, as in a child's 
garden, they are stuck into the ground by their stalks only, and 
have not grown where we now see them. We know that even the 
lily floating on the waters, the orchid hanging in the air, keeps a 
tenacious yet unseen hold upon something beyond itself, without 
which its nourishment and life would fail ; and all this bloom and 
verdure is suggestive of a root, possessing, it may be, no beauty 
for which we should desire it, yet detached from which the leaf 
of humanity will wither and its flower fade. 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE, 79 

** I am come in my Father's name, and ye re- 
ceive me not; another will come in his own 
name, him shall ye receive." The prophets 
who come in their own name, the apostles of 
human development, of social progress, find a 
willing hearing ; but where is our recognition of 
a divinely appointed agency ? where is our faith 
in that which hath appeared to man ? 

But because we believe in Man ; because we 
reason, if not always aright, of truth, of beauty, 
of perfection, and are full of reverence, full of 
pity for the nature in which we jSnd ourselves so 
fearfully and wonderfully fashioned ; because our 
age, with all its wants and errors, is still a lov- 
ing, a believing, an essentially human age, there 
shall yet come to pass concerning it the saying 
which is written, " In that day shall a man be 
more precious than gold, than the golden wedge 
of Ophir." The heart of this age is in its right 
place, and with that heart it may yet believe 
unto righteousness, and escape the downward 
path towards which so many of its intellectual 
tendencies are dragging it. We have not yet 
drawn forth the true bitterness of the fruit 
whose mortal taste is already so plainly to be 
discerned among us, or many a yet noble and 
tender spirit would -exclaim, " Let not the pit 
shut her mouth upon me," — Materialism, the 



80 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

grave of all that is human, as well as of all 
that is heavenly, within man. The heart craves 
what the world would take from it ; Man needs 
what no system invented by man has yet prom- 
ised, far less given, — a Comforter, an enlight- 
ening, guiding Spirit, wanting which he remains 
a mockery even to himself, the sport of circum- 
stance, a Samson blind and fettered in the hall 
of the Philistines. '^The world knows but a 
Creator^ spirits claim a Father, '^^ And O that 
we could see that He has abeady come forth to 
meet us ; that we could, even in tliis our day, 
perceive the season of our heavenly visitation, 
and see to what its rejection tends, — a moral 
atheism, blotting out God from the region of 
spiritual life, as surely as the denial of a Per- 
sonal cause excludes Him from the visible 
world. 

" There is a Spirit in man," faithful to its in- 
stincts even when astray as to their true object ; 
it wanders often, yet feels through very sadness 
and weariness how far it has got from home. 
And hence come those utterances (of which you 
tell me), strange prophetic voices, a groaning 
and travail-pain of Humanity, which, even in the 
hearts of those who reject revelation, testify to 
its waiting for some great Bfedemption. If man 
refiises the bread which came down from heav- 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 81 

en, never was it so hard for him to live " by 
bread alone " as now. His very wealth and in- 
crease has brought with it a sense of poverty, — 
because he has become rich, and increased in 
goods, he knows, as he did not before, that he is 
wretched, and miserable, and blind, and naked. 
The energy of his wrestling with the things of 
time and sense has awakened instincts of which 
but for the ardor of that struggle he might 
have known little. He conquers kingdoms, and 
weeps like the ancient conqueror. The world 
which he has vanquished cannot satisfy him. 
He feels himself to be greater than the universe, 
yet feebler than the meanest thing within it 
which can follow the appointed law of its being. 
The splendor of his material acquisitions is but 
a robe too short and thin to wrap him from cold 
and shame. He can do great things, but what 
is he ? To have all, and to die saying, " Is this 
all?^^ is the epitaph of many a rich and wasted 
life. Every fresh region man breaks into re- 
veals new wonders, and with them new enig- 
mas, calling upon him to solve them or perish. 
There is a social complication, a pressure in our 
present day, which is not to be answered by an 
unmeaning clamor against rational enlighten- 
ment. We cannot stay the current that is bear- 
ing us onwards so swiftly, but we may guide 

4* F 



82 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

our course upon it, looking to the stars above. 
" Light is good," good for its own sake, what- 
ever it may show us. In an anxious and inquir- 
ing age, '' when men shall run to and fro, and 
knowledge be increased," we are told that " the 
wise shall understand." They shall find their 
safety, not in placing faith and science in an un- 
real opposition, not in closing their eyes to the 
revelation of God's power, but in opening their 
hearts to the secrets of his wisdom " double to 
that which is." * 

And, now especially that thought and authori- 
ty are at open issue upon many questions, may 
not some among us, ever ready to judge those 
who are without, lay to heart the solemn decla- 
ration of the Apostle, that judgment must begin 
at the house of God ! It is so easy to be ortho- 
dox in creed and statement ; so safe to rest in 
a merely traditionary belief, that many a deco- 
rous Christian fails to perceive the sure though 
invisible connection between the lip-confession 
and life-denial of a merely outward profession, 
and the broader form of denial by which all 
such profession is derided. Yet between Christ 
mocked and Christ rejected there is but a step ; 
— who shall say how easily it is taken, or how 
quickly we may pass from the hollow homage, 

* Job xi. 6. 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 83 

the " Hail, Master ! " which mocks our Lord, 
to the smiting and buffeting of open outrage? 
When Christ is invested with but the show of 
sovereignty, the reed placed in his hands will 
be quickly taken, as by the soldiers, to smite 
his head. This reed is nominal Christianity^ a 
strange slip of a degenerate vine, beneath whose 
blighting shadow a poison-growth of unbelief 
never fails to root itself. 

And it is certain that this most mournful 
characteristic of our age — the disposition to 
think slightingly of Christianity,* to ask it what 
it has done or can do for the world — has been 
helped forward by a want on the part of the 
professing Church of whole-hearted faith in its 
renewing^ transforming energies. Is it strange 
that the supernatural revelations of the Gospel 
should be looked upon as foolishness by the 
world, while they remain — who shall say to 
how many among us — a stumbling-block, one 
that we dare not remove ? but surely there are 

* When Jesus was taken before Herod, the king hoped, it is 
said, to have seen some great thing done by him, " and he ques- 
tioned him in many words, and He answered him nothing.'* The 
attitude of our day is not that of an utter rejection of Christianity. 
Like Herod we appreciate and examine into it, questioning it in 
many words as to what it can do for the world, just as we put the 
same question to the schemes of science and philosophy. But to 
an age which, like Herod, is deficient in real faith in its Author, 
Christianity often answers — nothing. — J. E. B. 



84 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

' systems now in favor, temples made with hands^ 
into which we find it hard to fit the stone cut 
from the rock without hands. Human nature 
has been ever in love with a modified Chris- 
tianity, slow to receive Divine truth simply, and 
as it is given. Hence the dressings and un- 
dressings to which Christianity has been sub- 
jected. Roman Catholicism has accommodated 
it to human sense; Rationalism accommodates 
it to human intelligence, or rather strives to 
do so ; for are those who would make man the 
measure of all things sure that they have found 
man's true measure ? If the doctrines of Reve- 
lation are mysterious, are the facts of Life less 
so? Are "the things of a man" and the things 
of God fitted^ so to speak, by the mere cutting 
off of all that transcends reason, — itself but a 
part of man ? Reason has its outposts, firom 
which it is continually driven back defeated ; it 
rules, but under a perpetual check; it cannot 
take account of its own wealth, or fill the 
region it presides over. It is but a noble vassal, 
^' one that knoweth not what his lord doeth." 
Man reverences his reason, and trusts it, as far 
as it will lead him, hut that is not his whole 
lengthy for he feels that he, the reasonable Man, 
is something greater than it is. Sometimes his 
dreams are truer than its oracles, and this he 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 85 

knows. Therefore one deep calleth to another, 
and the answer to this call is Faith. Faith ad- 
dresses itself to man's whole being, — it sounds 
every depth ; it touches every spring ; it calls 
back the soul from its weary search within itself, 
full of doubt and contradiction; it presents it 
with an object, implicit, absolute, greater than 
itself, — " One that knoweth all things." It pro- 
vides for every affection, every want and aspira- 
tion. Faith stretches itself over humanity as 
the prophet stretched himself above the child, — 
eye to eye, mouth to mouth, heart to heart ; and 
to work a kindred miracle, to bring back life to 
the dead, by restoring the One to the One, — the 
whole nature of Man to the whole nature of Grod. 

Christianity, under its merely preceptive char- 
acter, has done much for the world ; received as 
a law, it has contributed greatly to social order 
and well-being ; but thus received, it is, like the 
Law, too weak to accomplish for any individual 
soul the mighty change through which it be- 
comes alive unto God. For this work is more 
than reformative ; it asks for a renewing element 
— ''fire upon earth" — which none save One 
coming down from heaven can kindle. Our 
cold, decaying Humanity must be fed by a fuller 
life than its own, must be nourished in a warm- 
er bosom, before it can attain to any enduring 



86 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

heat of nobleness or love. If we look through 
the long generations that have gone before us, 
we shall find that every nobler deed has been 
wrought, every fairer life lived, " not after the 
law of a carnal commandment, but after the 
power of an endless life." The sum of that 
great unwritten history lies folded in few 
words, — ''All these lived in faith^'^ in living 
faith in a living Person. Shall we look for 
those who have done great things for Christ or 
for the world among the philosophical admirers 
of Christianity, among its formal adherents ? 

Shall we find them even among those just 
persons to whose righteous hearts it is indeed 
a law and honorable, but not as yet the law 
in which is the spu'it of life ? Nay, rather 
among such as have sought and have received 
a Sign, the sign of the Son of Man in heaven, 
and in this sign have fought and conquered. 
Among superstitious men, believing in many 
things, yet believing in Him ; among ignorant 
men, knowing literally nothing but Jesus Christ 
and him crucified, yet knowing him upon no 
earthly testimony. Here too lies the quiet, per- 
haps unspoken secret of those lives of holy, un- 
selfish beauty, in which no communion has been 
more rich than our own, — to all of these Christ 
has come, not by water only, but by blood.* 

* Note F. 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE, 87 

The foolishness of God, that which man 
counts dark and incomprehensible, is stronger 
than man, and nothing else is stronger. Man 
loves his own ease, his own labors ; there is a 
sweetness in the natural vine which he will not 
leave, even at the call to a kingdom, except for 
a cause shown. And hence comes the power 
of that mighty appeal, the attraction of which 
He who knew what was in Man prophesied 
when he said, " I, if I be lifted up, will draw 
all men unto me." When God, says Bunyan, 
would tune a soul. He most commonly begins 
at the lowest note ; so has it been in the tuning 
of the world's wide discord. In the depths of 
the great atonement God has sounded the low- 
est note, and to this every life, lived during the 
last eighteen hundred years in harmony with 
him, has been attuned. In heaven and upon 
earth there are 

" Two vast spacious things, 
The which to measure it doth man behoove, 
Yet few there be that sound them, — Sin and Love." 

We know little of either until we learn of them 
at the Cross. There are abysses whose depths 
can only be guessed at by the weight of the 
plummet winch is required to sound them. 
Such is sin ; it remains, as it has been from 
tho beginning; a dark enigma, drawing thought, 



88 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

as through some terrible fascination, to fasten 
itself on the problem of its existence.* Here 
Reason has transgressed its limits, and Faith 
outrun her heavenly guidance. Wise men, in 
their despair of accounting for the origin of 
evil, have been driven to deny its existence in 
theories too thin to cheat any heart that has 
been pierced, yet enlightened, by its sharp re- 
ahty ; and pious men, falling into the snare which 
Job's integrity declined, have " spoken lies for 
God, and argued deceitfully for him." Hence 
dreams like that of Optimism,f fictions, such 
as evil being but the privation of good; — names 
matter little ; sin desolates as widely, pain racks 
as keenly, whether we account for their exist- 
ence upon a positive or a negative theory. Yet 
it is remarkable that our Saviour, while he does 

* Note by the Editor. — " And I inquired what iniquity was, 
and found it to be no substance, but the perversion of man's will 
from Thee, the Supreme, towards lower things." — 'St. Augustine, 

"The Scripture, and the Faith, and the Truth say. Sin is 
naught else but that the creature tumeth away from the un- 
changeable Good, and betaketh itself to the changeable, that it 
turneth away from the Perfect to that which is in part and im- 
perfect, and most often to itself." — Theologica Germanica, 

" There is no sin but selfishness, and all selfishness is sin." — 
Julius Muller. 

t It is scarcely necessary to observe that the Christian opti- 
mism is as unsatisfactory as the philosophic, and must remain so, 
as long as there is no sight so common as that of unsanctifieJ 
sorrow and unchastening pain. 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 89 

not explain this awful problem, does not explain 
it away. To the old, ever-recurring question, 
"Whence these tares?" he answers simply, 
"An enemy hath done this." Man has striven 
to bridge over this chasm between his soul and 
God with theories contradictory to the reason 
they profess to satisfy, and false to the moral 
sense they desire to soothe ; but He who spake 
as never man spake does not reason upon this 
subject. He sees this great gulf set ; he knows 
what its mouth has devoured of earth's best 
and noblest: one thing most precious of all 
remains ; — he flings Himself within it. 

And though this gulf still yawns wide, and 
stretches itself even unto hell, though it still 
underlies Nature's fairest scenes, and earth's 
pomp and beauty and rejoicing descend into it 
daily, the beginning of the end has been made. 
Sin and pain and death continue their rav- 
ages, upheld by him from whom their strength 
is derived. The Beast lives, yet it has re- 
ceived a deadly wound ; its dominion is taken 
away, though its life is prolonged for a season 
and a time. 

Although the work of renovation is a hid- 
den work, a slow one, " for there are many 
adversaries " ; though it proceeds as yet among 
checks and hinderances, as a fair city might 



90 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

rise from its ruins behind a broken and still 
beleaguered wall, yet the sure foundation has 
been laid. Deep and wide as decay has struck, 
the remedy has pierced still deeper. If we 
must come to the Cross to learn of sin, here 
too must we come to learn of love, — a love 
of which we know but little until we see it in 
its crowning work. For our God is one that 
hideth himself. Nature, yea also Providence, 
is thick with dark anomalies ; day unto day 
these utter speech, and night unto night de- 
clare knowledge, — a language of sign and 
parable, where the voice is not heard; One is 
there, only One, who has shown us plainly of 
the Father. God's bow lies upon the cloud of 
Circumstance, yet light does not break through 
it until we • see it in the face of Him in whom 
the excellency of His glory shines. Human 
life is beset with contradictions, at the solution 
of which we are but guessers, until Christ solves 
the riddle that was too hard for us, — bringing 
forth food and sweetness from the very jaws 
of the devouring lion. " If thou wouldst have 
me weep," said one of old, '' thou must first 
weep thyself." Grod has wept. In the strong 
crying and tears of the Son, in the great drops 
of sweat as it were blood falling down to the 
ground, lie the witness to the travail of the 



TRE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 91 

Father's soul. "Herein is love," consoling, 
rebuking love, — love that has no consolation so 
strong as the rebuke it administers. "Behold 
my hands and my feet ! " these testify to a ne- 
cessity endured, an anguish shared. It is our 
brother's blood that cries unto us from the 
ground: "A spirit hath not flesh and bones, 
as ye see me to have." 

I often think of George Herbert's homely and 
affecting verse, — 

" Death, thou wast once an uncouth, hideous thmg; 
• • • • • 

But since our Saviour's death 

Has put some blood into thy face, 

Thou hast grown sure a thing to be desired 

And full of grace." 

Our Saviour's death has put blood also into 
the face of life. That which robs death of its 
sting robs life of its bitterness. When we once 
realize that the Son of God, in taking humanity 
upon himself, took something which he keeps stilly 
and will not relinquish throughout eternity, we 
become alive to an awful consolation. We see 
Creation and its great High-Priest standing as 
those whom God hath joined together never to 
be sundered ; and through this living bond, 
" even his flesh," the anguish of the burden 
laid upon us, down to the groaning of mere 
animal existence, arises through a softening 



92 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

medium. An old Greek litany supplicates 
Christ by " His known and unknown suffer- 
ings." Who shall say how much the first were 
exceeded by the last, or fathom the depth of 
those words, " He tasted death for every man " ? 
Of the intensity of Christ's sufferings we know 
and can know little ; as little^ perhaps^ of their 
limits and duration. What was the weight of 
the burden He took upon him in being found as 
man, and is it altogether laid aside ? Has He 
who was once acquainted with grief unlearnt 
that lesson ? Has the Man of sorrows, in the 
persons of his afflicted members, altogether 
ceased to grieve ? 

Was it only for those three and thirty years 
that the chastisement of our peace was laid up- 
on Him ? only upon the cross that he bore the 
weight of that which he takes away, — the sins 
of the whole world ? The Word on this subject 
contains utterances into whose depth of meaning 
only the Spirit can admit us. I allude to say- 
ings like that of the Master, " Saul, Saul, why 
persecutest thou me ? " to declarations like that 
wherein the servant affirms his rejoicing in the 
sufferings which fill up that which is left behind 
of the afflictions of Christ.* These intimations 

♦ How are we to understand the words which tell us of Christ 
being crucified afresh, and put to open shame by our backslid- 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE, 93 

are not dark, neither are they thinly scattered ; 
they witness to a union more close and intimate 
than that through which Christ, hefore his com- 
ing in the flesh, redeemed and pitied his people, 
and carried them all the days of old. Yet when 
we cease to hold to things by the heart, how 
little of them do we really retain ! We let liv- 
ing facts stiffen into doctrinal abstractions, until 

ings ? of the Spirit grieved, interceding for ns with unutterable 
groanings ? Are such expressions to be received as merely fig- 
urative ? Are we, as so many divines have taught us, to believe 
that God in using them is but accommodating himself to the 
weakness of our human conceptions, and allow ourselves to be 
cheated out of the assurance of a Divine sympathy, through the 
shallow glosses which have robbed so many Scriptures of their 
meaning ? God^s anger, as inward and outward desolation testify, 
is a real thing; so are His love and His pity real, — real as the 
nature they spring from, the misery they meet ; " and his com- 
passions fail not, his mercy endureth forever." 

" Veritas est maxima caritasy 

The Reformers lay such an almost exclusive stress upon the 
work of Christ, that which he does/or us, that an outside feeling 
has crept within the heart of Protestantism ; we have light blaz- 
ing on us from many windows, but we miss the wannth wh?ch 
Catholicism^ even Roman Catholicism, has retained, because it 
recognizes far more fully than we do the intimate personal com- 
munion ever existing between Christ and his body of Elect. 
And in this, and not in any idea of meritorious works (a tree 
twice dead, plucked up from the very roots), lies the secret of 
their extraordinary sacrifices for Him ; more particularly as 
shown in outward beneficence, and sympathy with the wants 
and woes of the human body, — that body of our Humiliation 
which He who once condescended to its weakness still bears 
upon Him in power. 



94 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

Truth itself begins to wear a cold and fictitious 
aspect : it is not in fact trueybr us until we have 
made it our own through needing it, and loving 
it. It is not through a merely intellectual recog- 
nition that the human spirit can give its Amen 
to the yea of God. We see how firm a hold the 
Church of the Early and Middle Ages kept upon 
this great truth, — the actual presence of Christ 
with his people ; how this belief revealed, and 
as it were transfigured itself in legends which 
superstition itself cannot rob of their undying 
significance. When St. Francis stoops down to 
kiss the leper's wound, and sees that his place 
has been taken by the Saviour ; when St. Mar- 
tin hears these words in his vision, " Behold, 
Martin, who hath clothed me with his cloak," 
we see that the Church to these men is not the 
mere tomb of Christ, but his warm and living 
body, sending a pulsation through every mem- 
ber. There is now among us a disposition to 
separate the principles of Christianity from the 
facts upon which they are founded. We might 
as well attempt to separate the soul from the 
body without destroying the Man. For these, 
its supernatural facts, are the very life and 
breath and blood of Christianity ; its principles 
can only take root in a re-created humanity. 
" Give me a point," said the mechanician, " and 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 95 

I will remove the world." When Man's sonl is 
effectually moved, it is from a stand-point beyond 
itself. Experience shows ns (as I have said) 
that Humanity has never been truly built up 
unto God, but upon the foundation rejected of 
earthly builders, the mysteries of the Christian 
faith. Christianity is a building of which as 
much lies sunk beneath the surface as is reared 
above it. It is a tree whose roots strike down as 
deep into the earth as its branches spread wide in 
the air above, and when we seek to pluck up any 
one of these roots, a groan goes through its uni- 
versal frame. We say of earthly things, " that 
which comes from the heart goes to the heart " ; 
so it is with heavenly. When Man's heart is 
touched, it is through that which comes straight 
from the heart of God. These mysteries, the 
life and death of God in the flesh, his spiritual 
resurrection in the reconciled soul of Man, are 
messages^ they are God's authentic * love-letters, 
showing us plainly of the Father. 

* Joseph Alleyne, in dying, would often commend the love of 
Christ, " often speaking of his sufferings and of his glory, of his 
love-lettersj as he called the holy history of his life, death, resur- 
rection, ascension, and his second coming, the thoughts of which 
would ever much delight him." 

And to say that the mystery of our Saviour's passion lies at 
the heart of the whole of man's life in Him is to say little, for it 
is that heart itself; let love or sorrow pierce but a little deeper, 
and we shall find it even in our own. There is surely something 



96 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

Those who were first in Christ lived very 
near the heart of these awful yet tender mys- 
teries. We find them connecting every function 
of the soul's renewed hfe with what has been 
suffered and obtained for it through another 
life, " of whose fulness we have all received." 
It is scarcely possible to read the Epistles with- 
out feeling that Luther's often-quoted remark, 
" There is much religion in the possessive pro- 
nouns," may be fairly extended to prepositions, 
so threaded are the whole apostolic writings with 
these minute, adhesive fibres, — small members 
of our universal speech, yet boasting great things, 
as steps in the ladder by which the human spirit 
ascends even unto heaven. 

very affecting in the fact that the sufferings of Christ should lie 
so much closer to the hearts of his people than all that those 
sufferings have won for them ; that it shoiild be ever the Anguish 
endured, and not the Glory obtained, which touches all the fin- 
est, deepest chords of the renewed nature. I find a proof of this 
in the fact that dying believers, soon to enter upon 

" Zion's habitation, 
Zion, David's sure foundation," 

seem to care comparatively little for hymns descriptive of the 
joys and glories of heaven, beautiful as many of these are. It is 
to the cross, not to the crown, that the last look turns, the linger- 
ing grasp cleaves ; and the latest conscious effort of the believer is 
sometimes to lift himself to Him who was lifted up, through the 
half instinctive repetition of some words like those of Gerhardt's 
Hymn on the Passion, the grandest of uninspired compositions: 

" head so full of bruises, 
So full of scorn and pain." 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 97 

By and tJirough and of and in One " (j/* whom 
are all things, and we in him." It is interesting 
to observe that, while the Saints of old appeal 
simply to God through his revealed attributes, 
his mercy, his faithfulness, his goodness which 
endureth forever, it is upon God manifested in 
the flesh, in the facts of our Lord's life, and the 
relations which that life has established^ that the 
Apostles found their claim. They rest not so 
much upon what God is, as what he has become 
to men, their neighbor in Christ Jesus, and as 
such bound, as an old divine says, to love them 
even as Himself. 

" What hath man done that man may not undo, 
Since God to man hath grown so near alcin t 
Did his foe slay him ? he shall slay his foe ; 
Hath he lost all ? he all again shall win ; 
Is sin his master? he shall master sin." 

And if here, as elsewhere, the congregations 
of the ungodly have robbed us ; if in the confu- 
sion which reigns in the visible churches, it has 
become hard for believers to recognize the fact 
of their living membership with Christ and with 
each other, let us seek more earnestly for the 
light* which makes these relations manifest. 
We shall not find it in the phosphorescence of 
any dead man's candle ; exhalations from the 
tombs, though they be the tombs of saint and 

* 1 John i. 7. 

5 G 



98 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE, 

martyr, give but an uncertain glimmer. For 
it is not galvanic, but organic life we need, and 
this is not to be obtained by descending into the 
Past to touch the ashes even of a prophet's bones. 
They who stand by the grave, even of Christ 
himself, may behold, with the devout women, a 
Vision of Angels, hut him they see not. " He is 
not here, he is risen. Behold, he goeth before 
you into Galilee." 

" Man's soul has widened with his world." It 
is evident that prescriptive authority must have 
now less weight with him than in ruder, less 
thoughtful ages. A child believes things because 
he is told them ; a man believes them because they 
are true. To the human spirit is now that word 
spoken, — '' He is of age ; ask himself." 

And it is plain that there was never in this 
world's history a time in which, to speak after a 
human manner, it was so easy to miss Christy so 
hard to do without him^ as now. For it is not 
only the outward courts that have become wide, 
yet crowded ; science continues to open up infi- 
nite yet densely peopled spaces, lengthening out, 
although every link be golden, the chain between 
man's soul and God, so that even the Christian 
tliinker must respond with sadness to the bold 
and satirical saying of Hazlitt, " In the days of 
Jacob there was a ladder between heaven and 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 99 

earth, but now the heavens have gone farther off^ 
and are become astronomical." The very rev- 
elation of God's power has tended to weaken the 
sense of his immediate presence ; yet it is not 
here^ but in another region, still richer, fairer, 
and more perilous, that our peculiar danger lies. 
Man, within the limits of his own nature, has 
broken into a world of which former ages, and 
these the most intellectually subtile and refined, 
knew nothing. The time is past when all things 
within that nature could be mapped out in broad 
and even lines ; how many motives and impulses 
do we find at work within us of which we can- 
not say that they are good or evil, only that they 
are natural, human. Therefore is there a diffi- 
culty, ofttimes an agony, introduced into the 
Christian life, of which earlier ages were uncon- 
scious; partly because the forms of good and 
evil were then more definite, and partly because 
what Goethe says of the individual holds true for 
the race he belongs to ; the easy-hearted, even 
reckless simplicity of youth, carries it unawares 
past many a danger where to pause and to inves- 
tigate would be to be lost. For there are voices 
that even to hear is bewilderment ; shapes that 
but to look upon is madness. Our path is beset 
with such, alluring, beckoning, inviting us we 
know not whither; must we parley, must we 



100 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE 

wrestle with each of these to compel it to utter 
a clear message, to assume a certain likeness? 
The way is long, the day is short ; we must on- 
wards, though the leaves above our head mut- 
ter, though the flowers that we would pluck are 
charactered, though each simple and famihar 
thing beside our way has become instinct with 
a terrible consciousness, linking it with our own 
being. Literature and art, even Nature herself, — 
these which for freer spirits had a charm of their 
own, and needed not any other, — now breathe 
and burn in the fulness of a parasitical hfe ; the 
fever of man's conflict has passed across them ; 
their bloom and fragrance feeds and is fed by 
fire kindled far down at the central heart. The 
shadow of Humanity falls wide, darkening the 
world's playground, and games, be they those of 
Hero and Demigod, can no more enthral us. 
What is Science itself but a gigantic toy, which 
may delight but can never satisfy the heart, 
which, even through its sadness and perplexity, 
has learnt that it is greater than all that sur- 
rounds it? Which confesses that, though the 
light within it is too often darkness, still is that 
very light " more worthy than the things which 
are shown by it " ; stiU are Man's errors greater 
than Nature's order, his miseries nobler than her 
splendor ; still is he 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 101 

" Chief 
Of things God's hand hath fashioned, sorest curst, 
Yet holding still the First-Born' s birthright, first 
In grandeur and in grief." 

To know more of ourselves, and to know 
meanwhile no more of God, makes our present 
anguish and desolation. But what if even here 
were our safety ? What if it were through this 
very wound that the good Samaritan as he jour- 
neys designs to pour in the wine and oil of his 
consolation ? What if, in learning* more of the 
awful and tender mystery of our own nature, we 
become acquainted with the yet more awful, more 
tender mystery that encompasses it? Never 
did the heart assert itself so strongly as now ; 
highly strung and sensitive, it finds inward con- 
tradiction and outward circumstance bear hard 
upon it ; yet, beset by a thousand warring im- 
pulses, it has learnt its own weakness and its 
own strength, and out of the pressure and strait- 
ness of this siege it can take up its appeal to 
Christ out of the depths and into the depths of 
a common Nature. It can say, with the blind 
man, " Jesus, thou Son of David^ have mercy 
upon me." It has had its own voice thrown 
back upon it from the rocks ; has seen its own 
form transfigured upon the mountains; it has 
had enough of echoes, of illusions ; it seeks com- 

* Note G. 



102 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

munion, reciprocity; it needs that whicli can 
alone understand, alone answer it ; therefore the 
one flies to the one, — the heart to Christ. 

And let the heart of man be comforted ; it 
cannot outgrow its Christ ; yes, let the heart be 
comforted in him out of its poverty and its 
riches alike. When we remember that Christ, 
in taking unto himself Man's nature, took upon 
him all that it would become^ in how glorious and 
serene a light do the acquisitions of science 
stand ! This thought gives, as it were, music 
and measure to the onward march of humanity ; 
changes it from an outbreak of tumultuous forces 
to steady and disciplined progress. And if, 
turning from the world of action, we flash the 
light of this truth within the dim and many- 
chambered region that lies beneath it all, here 
also we shall discover that in Christ there is a 
provision, though we may not at once find it, 
for the growth and expansion which has made 
Humanity without him like a fruit too heavy for 
the stalk it hangs on, dragged and trailed to 
dust by its very weight and splendor. Even 
through the wealth and apparent waste of ten- 
drils and suckers it is now putting forth, it may 
cleave closer, drink deeper unto Him. For all 
that awakens a sense of need within us draws 
us by so much nearer Christ ; no spiritual truth 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 103 

being our own until we have needed it ; as long 
as we can do without these Divine friends, they 
stand in some degree aloof from us, — feeble, 
wounded, even despairing, we must cast our- 
selves upon their very bosoms before they will 
receive or return our clasp. 

And let us not be discouraged because the 
life in Christ has grown less simple than it once 
was. In earlier ages, even in times not very 
far removed from our own, the Christian's 
course was " as straight as a rule could make 
it," because the license which surrounded him 
compelled him to cast aside all things so as to 
secure the one thing alone needful; to use a 
simile of your own, he was like a swimmer cast- 
ing off his garments, a hard-pressed rider throw- 
ing aside his weapons, — to breast the wave, to 
win the goal, was all in all. 

When the pressure upon faith comes chiefly 
from without, this very pressure forces up the 
life in a direct, unswerving line like that of the 
palm-tree, lifting up its golden abundant crown 
to heaven; the same life would now resemble 
that of a banyan, touching earth at many points, 
but at every one drawing forth fresh life and 
vigor ; less commanding in austere majesty, but 
more resembling the tree of prophetic vision, 
" a harbor for fowl of every wing." We must 



104 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

open our minds to this great fact, that all exist- 
ence is organic ; we cannot be, so to speak, one 
thing mentally and socially, and another thing 
Christianly, as if the life in Christ and the life 
in Adam flowed on together yet distinct, like 
two unmingling currents. The rational man 
will see Christ, as he sees all things, from the 
level upon which he, the rational man, stands. 
Man cannot see Christ at all except by light 
from above ; on the hill, as in the valley, we are 
in darkness until the dawn breaks ; but if sun- 
rise finds us upon the mountain-peak, is it not 
evident that the prospect its light discloses must 
be infinitely wider and more glorious than if it 
had overtaken us many degrees lower down ? 

Now that the whole table-land of existence is 
lifted into a higher region, we must discard such 
commonplaces as this, that there is no belief like 
that of the peasant and the child, and with them 
the dark and confused notions of Faith upon 
which all such axioms are founded. Faith is 
not an extrinsic thing, an outgrowth of the mind 
opposed to its rational convictions, its clear and 
intimate intuitions. It is reason enlightened by 
its Lord and Giver ; it is feeling reconciled with 
its great object ; it is in an emphatic sense " the 
right opinion of that which is.^^ As Christ is a 
living Person, so is Truth a living thing, that 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 105 

cannot be nailed like some foreign substance to 
the mind, but must permeate it, as like draws 
near to like. Until we see clearly that there 
is a harmony between that which we receive and 
that which we are ; until we admit that Divine, 
like human influences, can only do their work 
upon the soul through finding a point of contact 
within it^ we are scarcely so alive to the deep 
moral significance * of life as to see how it is 
through that which we believe, approve, yes, 
even through that which we like^ that the soul is 
prepared to receive the impress of Caesar or of 
God. " He that is of the truth, heareth my 
voice." This is a deep saying ; so also is that 
of the prophetic psalm which declares plainly 
that our Lord reveals himself under aspects 
varying with the moral and spiritual conditions 
of those who look upon him : '' With the merci- 

* A significance which, runs through it all. Every book, for 
instance, has a moral expression, though, as in the human face, 
it may not be easy to say what it consists in. We may take 
up some exquisite poem or story, with no directly religious bear- 
ing, and feel that it is religious, because it strikes a chord so deep 
in human nature that we feel it is only the Divine nature, " God 
who encompasses us," that can respond to what it calls forth. 

From some books, especially such as treat of sin with levity, 
an odor of death escapes; about others there is an almost 
sensible savor of life unto life. Some quaint old English 
poems and devout essays send a fragrance into the very soul ; 
to look into them is to open the tomb of a saint, and find it full 
of roses. 

5# 



106 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

fill, thou wilt show thyself merciful ; with the 
upright man, thou wilt show thyself upright; 
with the pure, thou wilt show thyself pure ; and 
with the froward, thou wilt show thyself fro- 
ward." 

If spiritual truths were things self-evident, 
like mathematical propositions compelling the 
assent of the mind they are addressed to, it 
would be hard to understand the extraordinary 
value which, under the Gospel dispensation, is 
attached to Faith. It would be hard to see how 
the possession of this one attribute could embalm 
as it were a man's whole soul and life ; how a 
human being could become dear to his Maker, 
simply because he saw that which those around 
him were not sufficiently enlightened to perceive. 
But is it not evident that this gracious disposition 
is one in which the whole man is included ? Is 
there not something in the very nature of spirit- 
ual Truth which demands for its reception more 
than the mere intellect, let it strive as it will, 
can compass, and something, too, in our own 
nature which makes us, as responsible beings, 
answerable for what, as regards this Divine truth, 
we see and hear ? To put this in other words, 
Can a spiritual truth be apprehended otherwise 
than saeramentally ? In all cases there will surely 
be a proportion between the soul's receptivity 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 107 

and the fulness that is poured within it ; a meas- 
we between what it brings and what it finds. And 
this St. Paul intimates, when he desires for his 
Ephesian converts that they may be so rooted 
and grounded in love as to be able to know that 
which passeth knowledge; to enter into that 
which he in vain attempts to shadow forth be- 
neath the figures of length and breadth and 
height and depth, — the love of Christ, — Love's 
secret, which only love itself can make intelligi- 
ble. " The love of God," saith one of old, ''pass- 
eth all things for illumination." One drop of 
this love shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy 
Ghost ; one expansion of the renewed mind in 
pity, in forgiveness, in love to the Father, in 
good-will towards men, will teach us more of 
what God really is than we could learn from 
a thousand disquisitions upon the Divine char- 
acter and attributes. And that which is the 
fulfilling of the law is also, in a great degree, 
the understanding of that which it fulfils : for 
love has an access, an intuition, of its own ; it 
attains the end while others are disputing about 
the means ; it needs not to have every word 
explained, defined, interpreted ; it is enough for 
it to know the voice^ the voice of the Beloved, to 
follow whithersoever that voice leads. 

And the voice of a stranger the heart will not 



108 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE, 

follow, even though it be the voice of Christ 
himself; therefore would it see more, know 
more, have more of Him, faith's sole, sufficing 
Object, without whom love in this world would 
be too sorrowful, and hope too vague a thing. It 
is interesting to observe how the practical spirit 
of our day asserts itself in this great demand, 
already audible to ears that listen to the under- 
swell that rises faint, yet clearly, above the agi- 
tating tumult of opinion. We need the living, 
spiritual Christ; and ours are not the needs which 
can be satisfied by gazing on his lifeless body, 
however curiously embalmed by formalism with 
rite and ceremony, neither will we allow mysti- 
cism to come by night to steal away his body, and 
fill its place with ideas and imaginations of its 
own. For that great demand, '' a philosophy of 
fruit," has been moved fi:om the kingdom of na- 
ture to that of grace ; here too we ask for a vin- 
tage, and desire to pass from speculation to that 
intimacy with its occupying subject which alone 
deserves the name of knowledge.* Is there not 
among us, even amid the very heat and dust of 
contending opinion, a manifest weariness of dis- 

* " There is only one kind of knowledge which can justly be 
called wisdom, — sapientia ; meaning properly a knowledge par^ 
iaJcing properly of the nature of a taste ; an intelligere in which 
there is at the same time a sapere which appropriates and takes 
in its object with a lively relish.'* — Ullmann. 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 109 

cussion ? And this from no indifference to dog- 
matic truth, the sure^ the only foundation for all 
that we can know or can receive of Christy but 
grounded upon the deep, ever-increasing convic- 
tion that even Truth itself, according to Locke's 
fine saying, will not profit us so long as she is 
but held in the hand, and taken upon trust from 
other men's minds, not wooed and won and 
wedded by our own. 

And here it is that, as regards many ques- 
tions now at issue, the plain matter-of-fact think- 
er and the ardent, inquiring Christian find a 
common standing-ground. The first will often 
ask of those who, whether for scriptural truth or 
for apostolic discipline, call upon him to come 
and behold their zeal for the Lord, " Where, 
among so many notions about the thing, is the 
thing itself? Has the fire gone out, or is it still 
smouldering beneath the fagots that have been 
brought to mend it?" The other, with a deeper 
meaning, will inquire, " What is the difference 
between placing our confidence in something 
which we do, or placing it in something which 
we think? We may as well rest in an ordinance 
as in an opinion, so long as we rest in either for 
its own saJce^ and not for the sake of that which 
the confession encloses, the form embodies, — 
even the Spirit, which, not to be contained in 



110 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

these, yet working through them all, converts 
them into things having life." And thus we 
have begun to tire of watchwords, to suspect 
that there is no necessary antagonism between 
the word which God has spoken and the sign 
which he has ordained. The Word itself has 
been made flesh, and has dwelt among us : will 
objective truth be less valued, Catholic institu- 
tions less loved, when each is held dear for the 
sake of that which it convej^s ? — even that in- 
ward and spiritual grace, the gift obtained by 
our Lord for us men, the breath, the soul of 
spiritual life, — a soul which we shall not surely 
expect to possess more, simply through possess- 
ing less of its body. For it is not by rejecting 
what is formal, but by interpreting it, that we 
advance in true spirituality ; the Spirit of God, 
even as the spirit of a man, works, and, as far as 
we yet understand the conditions of our being, 
lives ^ only through " the body which has been 
prepared for it." By things which we can see 
and hear, by things which our hands can handle, 
by words and forms, by doctrines and institu- 
tions, men live, and in them is the life of man. 
For it is neither by that which is merely natural, 
nor by that which is purely spiritual, that man's 
complex nature is nourished and sustained: he 
lives neither by bread alone, nor yet upon angel's 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. m 

food, but upon that in which the properties of 
eaph are included, — " the bread which came 
down from heaven to give Hfe unto the world." 

With regard to many of the truths of Christ, 
we are surely learning to be no more children, 
ever looking at things " in part," but men, able 
to appreciate them as they bear upon each other, 
and upon the facts with which life brings them 
into relation. And that peculiar condition of 
our being which makes it hard for us to be alto- 
gether " without partiality," which renders it 
certain that there will be to each believer some 
one aspect under which his Lord is, above all 
others dear, some ordinance in which He is 
above all others present, may, on the whole, 
help forward the perfect apprehension of Christ. 
Each individual soul, from the very constitution 
of our nature, will fasten upon that portion of 
Divine Truth which meets and answers to its 
own peculiar need ; and when we learn to look 
at Christianity as a living, organic whole, made 
for man^ and corresponding with what he is^ we 
shall the better understand that deep saying of 
the Apostle's, " There are differences of admin- 
istrations, but the same Lord " ; and understand 
also how it is that Christianity assumes a dis- 
tinctive character * in certain ages, among cer- 

♦ Note H. 



112 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

tain races, even in certain individuals. Clirist 
does not so unite himself to Humanity as to 
obliterate its native characteristics. Personality 
is a sacred thing, being the very stamp and 
print of God upon each human soul: I would 
say also, it is an awful thing, being that which, 
whatever else we may gain or lose, we keep 
through time and through eternity, through it 
hnowing and heing known. And sacred also is 
that characteristic impress which, whether in 
rehgious or national society, gives life and indi- 
vidual expression to the community that bears 
it. " Common sense," " public spirit," — are 
these mere words ? Words truly, but testifying, 
used or misused as they may be, to the fact of 
our being, in Adam and in Christ, members one 
of another, enjoying not only a separate but a 
corporate existence, the functions of which can 
only be exerted through fellowship and union. 

" Have we not one Father ? hath not one 
God created us ? and did He not make one ? " * 
All civil, as well as all Christian society, is based 
upon this confession, yet with this difference, 
that the social is the outward, and in some de- 
gree conventional, recognition of Brotherhood; 
the Christian, its hearty, inward acceptance, 
without which the distinctive mark of savage or 

♦ Mai. u. 10, 15. 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 113 

animal life will reassert itself in the very bosom 
of civilization. Selfishness, or selfism (as it 
stands in its old form), tends continually to sepa- 
ration, — solitariness. Nature, it is true, tells 
us that we cannot do without each other, if we 
would advance or prosper ; she bids us use each 
other, Christ bids us love each other, " even as 
he hath loved us," with no single, no self-cen- 
tred aim. He alone setteth the sohtary in fami- 
lies^ by giving, in his own Person, that common 
centre for hopes, interests, and affections, which 
is the principle of family, — united life. Nature 
draws men together, but even in this drawing 
there is a disuniting principle at work ; in social 
life, for instance, so admirable in its ideal out- 
line, we find practically something in ourselves 
and in others which makes it hard, even impossi- 
ble, to fulfil the obligations that w^e see most 
clearly. We find ourselves in the midst of con- 
tending wills, of confused, sometimes contradic- 
tory relations, — a strain is laid upon Humanity 
which, w^eak through a civil discord, it is not 
strong enough to bear unaided. 

" In Adam all dies " ; the flaw runs through 
to the foundations, the sword reaches even to 
the hfe. " The earth," saith Christ, " is weak, 
and all the inhabiters thereof; I bear up the 
pillars of it." Nature and humanity fail ; their 



114 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE, 

great charter is written in fading characters, dis 
tinct, it is true, in outHne, but not clearly legi- 
ble till held to the warmth of a heaven-kindled 
flame. In nature, even as in Christ, no man 
liveth, no man dieth, to himself; and of this 
human society, even under its most limited con- 
ditions, makes us aware, by showing the action 
and reaction ever at work between the individ- 
ual and the community he belongs to. We see 
that a man really becomes better or worse mor- 
ally, advances or retrogrades socially, according 
to the standard of life which prevails around 
him, — a standard which he himself is at the 
same time helping to depress or raise. This is 
a truth which we meet by the wayside, and as 
often pass without heeding it. Yet once in the 
course of this world, in the history of a Man 
who lived, who died for the people, who had no 
personal interests (as we are accustomed to con- 
ceive of them), and whose life^ on any materialise 
tic theory^ would have been an impossibility^ this 
truth has been taken up upon the Mount, and 
there so transfigured and glorified, that men who 
toil and struggle below, seeing it in its beauty, 
"running to it, salute it." In the life and in 
the teaching of Christ, a clear ideal has dawned 
upon men, and we must not be discouraged 
though we should find it, like all other ideals^ 
hard to be realized in this present life. 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 115 

The pang of all true spirits in political, in 
social, in Christian life alike is this, to see 
clearly what we cannot as yet embrace wholly. 
Nor must we despair if this pang should grow 
keener with increasing light; 

"As tlie day lengthens; the cold strengthens." 

Two principles are at work within Christianity , 
twin-existent, of which as yet, travailing and in 
haste to be deHvered, she crieth out, — the de- 
sire for unity, and the passionate love for truth. 
These desires, under the present limitations of 
human nature, are antagonistic, and have often, 
in darker ages, torn the bosom at which they 
were fed. Yet they are no less of Christ, bring- 
ing, according to his prophecy, a Sword into the 
world. We see in the Gentile world no desire 
for unity, — a desire ever founded on the love, 
either in earnest or in possession, of some fixed, 
indisputable truth. And of this they had so 
little conception, that Pilate's question, " What 
is truth?" expresses, as it were, the sense of 
the ancient world. He did not wait for an 
answer, because he did not believe there was 
any to be found ; all things being true for those 
who held them to be so. We see how sociable, 
to use their own expression, the old religions 
were in this; how ready to adopt and ingraft 



116 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

any new idea or form of belief which seemed 
good for use, or even for ornament, in social life. 
We see, too, how opposed to this plastic genius 
of the Old World is that, the arrow of the Chris- 
tian Church, which has rankled so sorely in past 
ages, and even now diffuses a bitterness which, 
however, if rightly probed, discloses less the bit- 
terness of hatred than that of love, — of love, 
chilled and mortified, desiring to knit up the 
ancient bond, yet repelled even while it is at- 
tracted, because the iron and the clay are so 
mixed together that only the heat of charity at 
its whitest glow can weld them into one. The 
bosom of Christ is the grave, the only grave of 
religious acrimony ; we learn secrets there which 
render it possible for us to be of one heart, if we 
may not yet be of one mind, with all who lean 
upon it with us. For, shghtly as we may think 
to heal long-festering hurts, there is no cure * for 
religious dissension except that of spiritual ac- 
quaintance with God, as revealed to us in the 
mind and spirit of Christ Jesus. To " acquaint 
ourselves " thus with God is " to be at peace," 
for it is to learn how far more strong than all 

♦ Of this the soul's good Physician makes us aware in His 
memorable answer to his disciples, Luke ix. 54, 55. Even in 
rebuking their uncharitable temper, he reveals to them its 
cause and remedy: "Ye know not the Spirit of whom ye are 
the children." 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 117 

which separates is that which unites us in Him. 
So long as the external is more to us than the 
vital, the accidental dearer than the essential, so 
long, in short, as we are more Churchmen, more 
Protestants, more anything than Christians, re- 
hgious acerbity will continue. It ceases so soon 
as the pure language becomes more familiar to 
our lips than the dialects in which we are apt to 
merge it, and they who are in Christ, hearing 
each other speak plainly^ discover that they are 
one in Him, even as he is one with the Fa- 
ther. 

" Jerusalem is built as a city that is at unity 
with itself" ; that which moulds itself from with- 
in is free. Who that knows anything of what 
unity really is, — how deep its root, how kindly 
and unconstrained its expansion, — can be very 
solicitous for uniformity, — the outward union of 
" cold and neutral and inwardly divided minds^^^ 
the rigid, corpse-like symmetry of that which 
cannot of itself either live or go, but must be 
ever kept up by that by which it can be alone 
produced, — the strong pressure of the compelling 
hand ? Human spirits are only to be drawn to- 
gether and held together by the living bond of 
having found something in which they really do 
agree. And, though we may yet be far from 
the dawning of that day, known unto the Lord, 



118 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

when Opinion and Truth will be no more at 
variance, the "One Day* when there shall be 
One Lord and his Name One," we are, perhaps, 
not so far removed from a time when devout 
men, although they be of every nation under 
heaven, may hear each other speak of the won- 
derful works of God in their own tongue, — the 
tongue in which they were horn^ — a speech after 
which many among us have begun to yearn too 
fervently to be any longer occupied in framing 
shibboleths to prove our Brethren. 

Is not a day coming — yea, unto them who 
watch for the Morning, has it not already 
dawned ? — when we shall grow so covetous of 
good, of grace, as to turn our swords, too often 
sharpened against each other's bosoms, into 
ploughshares, to break up the fallow ground 
that lies within and around us ? when we shall 
beat our spears into pruning-hooks to dress the 
abundant increase of the days, when the sower 
shall overtake the reaper, and the treader of 
grapes him that soweth seed ? 

Already we are beginning to attach a spirit- 
ual meaning to the prophecy, " Eplu'aim shall 
not envy Judah, and Judah shall not vex 
Ephraim " ; to look forward to a time when 
enmity within God's kingdom shall so far cease 

* See the conclusion of Zechariah's prophecy. 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 119 

as to allow the kindred zeal of his people, — zeal 
which is but love under its more ardent aspect, 
— to be turned against the common enemies 
of their king, and to find there its triumphs^ 
" They shall fly upon the shoulders of the 
Philistines towards the west; they shall spoil 
them of the east together ; they shall lay their 
hand upon Edom and Moab, and the children 
of Ammon shall obey them." 

*'In the evening time there shall be light."" 
Evening brings with it the thought of home and 
rest, the desire for communing round the hearth 
with those of our own family and household. 
Many steps are now surely,* though perhaps 

* " The second Pentecost preceding the coming of our Sav- 
ioTir promises to be of a very universal character. Blessed 
time ! I now read the Old Testament promises of a great bless- 
ing ' on all flesh ' as if I had never read them before; they appear 
in a new light. Is not that prophecy of Zechariah striking, — 
* And the inhabitants of one city shall go to another, saying. Let 
us go speedily to pray before the Lord, and to seek the Lord of 
Hosts: I will go also. Yea, many people and strong nations shall 
come to seek the Lord ' ? 

" Those beautiful, questioning words of Isaiah about the Gen- 
tiles often occur to me : * Who are these who fly as doves to 
their windows ? * — a flock of doves speeding to their home, 
their ark of refuge. Noah's one dove, like the solitary Jewish 
Church, took refuge there from the wild waste of waters ; but 
all kindreds, peoples, tongues, and nations shall fly to their 
stronghold in latter times, their feathers of gold and their wings 
covered with silver, white and lovely, though they have lien 
among the pots." — J. E. B. 



120 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

half instinctively, seeking the Father's house , 
there is a sound of home-going feet, a murmur 
of anxious, loving recognition. The approach 
of night brings with it a sense of need and 
dependence, and in this, the World's great 
evening, the heart has become more alive to the 
pulsation which is ever at work throughout the 
whole of Christ's Mystical Body, a secret per- 
haps not to be entered upon very early in the 
behever's day. For the characteristic of the 
relio-ious or seekino; soul is solitariness. It is 
the withdrawal of the soul into the wilderness, 
there, in that deepened sense of personal ac- 
countability in which most religious convictions 
begin, to plead with God face to face, of indi- 
vidual sin, for individual redemption ; its cry is, 
" Lord, save me^ for I perish." 

The characteristic of the godly, the accepted 
soul, so joined unto the Lord as to be of one 
spirit with him, is fellowship ; in awaking up 
into Christ it awakes unto its brethren ; its ex- 
clamation is that of the Psalmist, '' Behold, 
there are many with me." 

And though the believer often seems, like his 
Master, to tread the wine-press alone, neither his 
conflicts nor his triumphs are ever really soli- 
tary. " Multitudes, multitudes," if unseen, are 
ever round him. Our Lord in his last solemn 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE, 121 

hour speaks of sanctifying himself /or the sake of 
those whom his Father had given him, that they 
also might be sanctified through the truth ; and 
though we may be unable as yet to pierce to the 
heart of all that is included in those words, 
" Because I live^ ye shall live also^^^ * we know 
enough even now to be aware that heaven and 
earth are drawn so much the nearer each other 
for every soul in living communion with Christ. 
As every waste and barren spot becomes a 
centre for noisome exhalations to gather in, a 
haunt for doleful creatures to repair to, so 
for every piece of territory reclaimed unto God 
the whole garden of the Lord advances by so 
much nearer its final blossoming as the rose. 
And as our seasons grow milder and more 
healthful because a marsh has been drained or 
a forest cleared in some remote district, so will 
the blessing which faith draws down extend far 
beyond the age or region whence its voice arose. 
Our warfare with the sins and sorrows of our 

* Our Lord says, " I am come that ye might have life, and 
that ye might have it more abundantly " ; life in its abundance, 
not in its mere continuity, which, at least to some spirits, would 
oflfer little to attract or satisfy. But what if we receive the say- 
ing in its intensity, — " the fulness of life," — extended capacities, 
enlarged affections, with infinite wisdom and love to meet and 
answer them ? '* My people shall be satisfied with my goodness, 
for I have satiated the weary soul, and replenished every sorrow- 
lul soul." 

6 



122 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

spirits may be accomplished in some far-distant 
field, and they who have tarried at home may 
thus divide the spoil with the mighty. The 
lowly Christian, lifting up holy hands to God, is 
at that moment strengthening those of some un- 
seen brother ; the ground upon which he kneels 
may continue dry as was the fleece of Gideon ; 
the object upon which his heart's desire and 
prayer is set may fail; yet his labor has not 
therefore been in vain in the Lord. The bless- 
ing he has sought may drop far hence upon the 
dwelHngs in the wilderness, may help to bring 
down floods upon the dry ground which has 
not of itself craved after the increase from on 
high. 

And knowing that neither the word which 
God sends forth, nor the holy impulse which 
that word quickens, can ever return to him 
void, are we not justified in much hope, in long 
patience ? You say to me, '' We ask for the 
continual dew of God's blessing ; but need we, 
in days when the enemy breaketh in like a 
flood, despair of seeing floods descend upon a 
"waiting world in answer to secret, persevering 
prayer?" "I wall pour floods upon the dry- 
ground." The ground is dry, yet it still con- 
tains within it that Root which sprung of old 
" out of a dry ground " ; a root which at the 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE, 



123 



scent of water will bud and bring forth boughs 
like a plant. " Revive, O Lord, thy work in 
the midst of the years ! " 

" Awake, O north wind, and come, 

thou south; blow upon my 

garden, that the spices 

thereof may 

flow out." 



Part Third. 



** Therefore, behold, I will allure her, 
And bring her into the wilderness, 
And speak comfortably to her j 

And I <wiU gi've her her <vineyards from thence^ 
And the valley of Trouble for a door of Hope." 

HosEA ii. 14, 15. 



■<2M^ 



PART III. 




^^^^Y soul is athirst for God," saith 
the Psalmist, " even for the living 



God." 

There Is a point beyond which 
neither the experience of others, nor even the 
utterances of the inspired Word can instruct or 
comfort the heart; it must have rejoicing in 
itself, and not in any other ; it must learn of its 
Lord as none save himself can teach. Its prayer 
is, ^^ Make me to hear thy voice.^^ It knows much 
about Jesus, hut it desires to know him; it can no 
longer rest in opinions, in ordinances, in Chris- 
tianity received as a system, in anything save 
in Christ, and in actual communion with him. 

But whence comes this sigh, the broken lan- 
guage of every Christian heart, " More of 
Christ!" How is it that our Lord hath been 
so long time with us, and yet we have not 
known him? 



128 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

Who among us has not experienced moments, 
and these perhaps often recurring, in which the 
heart has communed with itself and been sad, 
desiring that Jesus would himself draw near, yet 
ready, in its discouragement, to ask whether, in 
the very urgency of its desire and its endeavor, 
it may not be exacting too much of itself, may 
not be expecting too much of God ? 

For have we, in this urgency, enough consid- 
ered that saying of our Saviour's, " I have yet 
many things to say unto you, hut ye cannot hear 
them now " ? The natural man dies hard within 
us ; the man from heaven is not born * without 
a pang ; first the Anguish, then the Joy. Are 
our souls willing, yea, are they able^ to endure 
that anguish, ardently as we may desire the joy 
which makes it to be remembered no more? 
When the fulness of time is come, the fulness of 
strength will be given to meet it, and not before ; 
and, meanwhile, the way of life continues to have 
its own ache,f a sadness peculiar to itself. 

A certain degree of impatience seems natural, 
even befitting to Man, a being of keen though 
Hmited vision, of stringent though narrow grasp. 

* " We Tcnow not^'' says Bacon, speaking of natural life, " tDhether 
to be bom may not be as painful as to die.^* 
t Kein Reisen ist ohn Ungemach, 
Das Lebensweg hat auch sein Ach. 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 129 

His mind, as one who has sounded its very- 
depths has taught us, is naturally enamored of 
order and system ; he finds within himself the 
Surmise of a perfection which outward nature 
does not respond to, and for this he the more 
delights to trace a sequence through all her ap- 
parent confusion ; to discover that by earth and 
air and ocean there is a path such as the vul- 
ture's eye hath not known. And if science, as 
has been truly said, mourns to find a gap, every 
here and there, in her great chain of cause and 
consequence, — a link broken, perhaps dropt 
through forever, — how is it with the Christian, 
if in the ladder which joins earth to heaven 
there should be some rounds wanting? How 
is it when Man, who loves to track the end from 
the beginning, to see the flower wrapt up in the 
bud, finds that the life of the soul, like that of 
the insect, must pass through strange metamor- 
phoses, through sundry successive kinds of 
deaths ? when he discovers that the life of the 
Divine seed, set so deep in the heart and in the 
world, instead of being one of consistent growth, 
of free, harmonious development, may be the 
most fitly illustrated by the well-known simile 
of an acorn set within a jar of porcelain ; a 
mighty plant that must shatter its frail earthen 
tabernacle in its growing. 

6^ I 



130 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

And here we are reminded of what the 
prophet tells us, that God's thoughts are not our 
thoughts, neither His ways our ways. God has 
time for everything, and he has room for every- 
thing ; but it is far otherwise with his creature, 
and the tendency of all human effort is to go 
straight to a desired aim, putting on all possible 
strain and pressure. Thus, adding what we 
conceive of infinite power to what we know of 
finite will., we have arrived at an idea of Om- 
nipotence,* the exact opposite, surely, of that to 

* An idea in which, we lose sight of the fact that God, no less 
than man, has a nature, and within that nature laws by which 
he is irresistibly governed, and ends to which his designs infal- 
libly tend ; and it is probable, indeed certain, that, if we could 
see clearly into the depths of the Divine counsels, we should find 
nothing arbitrary or adventitious in any of the works or de- 
crees of the Almighty ; nothing, I mean, which could have been 
othermse than thai which it is. Choice is the glory of humanity, 
its distinctive attribute ; raising a man as high above the inferior 
creatures as it sinks him below Deity, for to choose is obviously 
as human as is to err ; infinite wisdom can see and take but one 
way. 

God, as his Apostle tells us, cannot deny or contradict himself; 
and upon this, His moral obligation, the moral freedom of man 
is founded, — a freedom which the gospel of life and immortal- 
ity has brought to light, and which it alone reveals. All systems 
founded upon nature gender to bondage ; behind which of these, 
whether Pagan or Pantheistic, do we not see, or rather feel, the 
dark background of power only, — in other words. Fate, decree- 
ing, creating, devouring all things, — the blind, impassive womb 
and grave of rational and sensitive life ? 

" God is a spirit." What is Predestination, the Christian form 
of Fatalism, but this, — the everlasting purpose of God towards 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 131 

which all we see of the Almighty's works would 
lead. We accustom ourselves to speak of his 
dealings, whether in grace or nature, as being 
sudden, irresistible, one in design and in execu- 

good, which sin by its very nature contradicts, and naturally 
opposes, so that that which is exceeding good becomes the ex- 
ceeding evil ("anguish, tribulation, and wrath'*) of those who 
resist it. The ungodly, unless, through repentance and faith in 
Christ, they fall back, as it were, upon God's plan, must perish 
with all that runs counter to it. Consider in this light the male- 
dictory passages in the Psalms, and the awful denunciations of 
the Prophets against national sins ; they are declaratory, having 
to do with what is, as much as with what will be. The spirit 
instructed in God's unchanging counsels (knowing His mind and 
purpose) reads the Present and Future by one light, and is 
able to interpret the one by the other. What has been (in this 
sense) will be, must be; under certain conditions certain results 
follow. 

Note by the Editor. — The awful question here touched 
upon has been too often presented by theologians in such a way 
as to shock the moral sense, by a necessary inference that the 
Divine economy is alike conservative of evil and good, misery 
and happiness. Implacable hate, immeasurable revenge, insatia- 
ble cruelty, — all that is abhorrent in man, — have been attribut- 
ed by the veriest blasphemy of logic to God. Eternity of evil, an 
endless, aimless horror of discord, torment, and despair, believed 
in as an end and purpose of creation, would seem to make heaven 
itself impossible. Our author, while admitting the fact of future 
suffering and loss, refers it to that conscious freedom of choice in- 
separable from man as a moral being, the denial of which in this 
life or the next involves the loss of his personal identity and ac- 
countability. The dark problem has no other solution than that 
which is reached through simple faith in the Divine Goodness. 
Shall not He do right? Can we not leave all in His hands? If 
we, when nearest to Him in feeling, yearn with tenderest pity 
after the sin-sick and suffering, how much more He whose name 
is Love ? Overwhelmed by a sense of our own moral infirmities 



132 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

tion ; yet Nature, so soon as ever we pierce below 
her broad surface-smile, betrays on every hand 
the marks of care, of patience, and adaptation. 
All that we learn of God in this region tends 

and the evU about us, we are too prone to question the sufficiency 
of His love; bound down, as it were, in the grave-clothes of 
spiritual death, we too often distrust " the power of His resur 
rection." " Infinite Goodness," says the Countess de Gasparin, 
"finds us more sceptical than infinite justice." Sin indeed 
throws a baleful shadow upon the future; but who shall set 
limits of time and place to the mercy of God, which " endureth 
forever " ? " When," asks the author of this book in her closing 
paragraph, " were Love's arms stretched so wide as upon the 
cross?" Looking thitherward, may we not tremblingly and 
reverently trust the larger hope, which, secretly cherished in the 
inmost heart of Christendom from the times of Origen and Duns 
Scotus to those of Foster and Maurice, has found its fitting utter- 
ance in the noblest poem of the age ? 

" yet we trust that somehow good 
Will be the final goal of iU, 
To pangs of nature, sins of will, 
Defects of doubt and taints of blood: 

" That nothing walks with aimless feet, 
That not one life shall be destroyed 
Or cast as rubbish to the void 
When God hath made the pile complete: 

" That not a worm is cloven in vain ; 
That not a moth with vain desire 
Is shrivelled in a fruitless fire, 
Or but subserves another's gain. 

" Behold ! we know not anything: 
I can but trust that good shall fall 
At last, — far ofi", — at last, to all, 
And every winter change to spring." 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 133 

more and more to bring liis works out of the 
domain of the magical^ to convince us that it is 
the human, and not the Divine energy, which 
craves for its purposes the signet-stamp of full 
and speedy accomplishment ; 

" For we are hasty builders, incomplete; 
Our Master follows after, far more slow 
And far more sure than we, for frost, and heat, 
And winds that breathe, and waters in their flow, 
Work with Him sUently.'* 

And turning to God's inner kingdom ; here, 
too, where the good to be desired is so great, 
the evil to be avoided so imminent, even here, 
also, we must confess that God wraps up his 
great designs in a husk or envelope, which will 
not fall from off them until the appointed time 
be come. What is the sacred history, from its 
very beginning, but that of a labor working to 
a mighty, far-seen, and remote end? What is 
Christianity, though it has in its cradle contend- 
ed with and crushed the serpent ? — even now 
but "an infant of days." We think, naturally, 
that God might make all things as he wishes 
them to be at once ; but we find that it is not 
his way to do so. God does not heal us with 
a touch. He uses means and processes, tedious 
often and peculiarly afflicting, — " He giveth 
medicine" for our mortal sickness; a life-long 



134 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

remedy for a life-long ill. And when we feel — 
as what Christian at times does not ? — an im- 
patience with the slowness of our own growth, 
let us look from ourselves into the universal 
Church of Christ, and ask this self-answering 
question of our hearts. How shall the growth of 
the part he rapid^ when that of the whole has been 
so slow? Let us consider the nature of the 
Earlier Dispensation, and recollect under how 
many costly and cumbrous folds of rite and 
ceremony the treasure of the world lay hid. 
Let us remember that this is still a hid treas- 
ure; that to the outwardly Christian, no less 
than to the Heathen World, the great mystery 
of redeeming love remains that world's Open 
Secret, declared^ yet uncommunicated^ plain to 
the ear, yet dark to the sense. Let us con- 
sider the slow, the uneven, the painful advance 
of the Mystic Spouse, — she that cometh up 
from the wilderness, leaning upon the arm of 
Her Beloved, — and we shall see that she, like 
her Lord, is wounded in her heart, her hands, 
and her feet. 

And that these things are so, the Christian 
must fain confess. Yet he would fain see them 
otherwise ; would fain behold if it were but 
the initial fulfilment of those deep, instinctive 
prophecies which overcharge his heart, — a 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 135 

heart too large for the hody through which it must 
for the present work. Yet, among many yet 
unfulfilled predictions, he must look upon one 
evermore fulfilling itself, and read in all that 
passes within him and around him a comment 
upon the Eldest-born of Prophecy : ^' Thou 
shalt bruise his head, and he shall hruise thy 
heeiy He must see evil following hard upon 
good, following because of good; Satan exalting 
himself against Christ; the Gates of Hell ad- 
vancing upon that against which they shall 
never prevail. Therefore is he often in this life 
perplexed and baffled, as one that knoweth not 
what his Lord dpeth. And it is this which 
gives such terrible, even blighting power to the 
words and writings of unbelievers, which barbs 
and sends home many a dull scoff" that would 
otherwise fall harmless, — that they touch a con- 
scious, ever-rankling wound. What they urge 
against Christianity is true. The believer 
knows, already knows, all that the infidel can 
tell him ; the eye of love can see as clearly as 
that of hate, and it has already mourned over 
all that the other exults in ; has seen springs 
sink down suddenly among the sands of the 
desert ; has looked upon bare and stony chan- 
nels, now ghastly with the wreck and drift of 
ages, yet showing where once a full, fair river 



13(> THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

bore down life and gladness to the ocean. The 
Christian would fain explain, account for, these 
long delays, this partial efficacy, this intermit- 
tent working. He feels that he is in possession 
of the key which is to open all these intricacies, 
but at present he finds that, like that of the Pil- 
grims, " it grinds hard in the lock." He sees 
Jesus, but he sees not yet all things put under 
him. The world around him is the same world 
which crucified his beloved Lord, and he must 
listen from age to age to its insulting cry, " If 
thou be the Christ, come down from the Cross, 
and we will believe." 

There is something sorrowful, even perplex- 
ing, in every life which is guided by a standard 
which those around us do not recognize ; to be 
living by the dial, when all around us go by the 
clock, brings a contradiction into the life of 
which the lives of those who are in league with 
circumstance, " the slaves and the masters of 
every day," know nothing. 

There is a sadness in all Idealism ; it lifts the 
soul into a region where it cannot now dwell ; 
it must return to earth, and it is hard for it not 
to do so at the shock of a keen revulsion, the 
dashing of the foot against a stone. But in no 
life does the secret of all tragedy,* the conflict 

* Interior freedom and exterior necessity, these are the two 
poles of the Tragic World. — F. Schlegel. 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 137 

between the Will and Circumstance, so unfold 
itself as in that of the Christian ; he, of all men, 
feels and mourns over that sharp, ever-recur- 
ring contrast of our existence, — the glorious 
capabilities, the limited attainments, of man's 
nature and destiny below. For his possibilities 
are at once more glorious and more assured 
than those of other men ; yet, as regards actu- 
alities, he among all men must be content to 
liave the least to show. And this, if we ex- 
amine deeply, will be found at the root of all 
sincere fanaticism. It is the agony of the spirit, 
its strict, convulsive embrace of some glorious 
truth, the soul's first love,* for the sake of which 
it refuses to perceive the limitations to which all 
things here have been made subject. Having 
tasted of the fruit of the tree of life, " good for 
food, pleasant to the eyes, and to be desired to 
make one wise," it forgets that old, unrepealed 
statute, that man, in the Second Adam as in the 
First, must till the ground from whence he was 
taken. f Until he returns to the earth, he must 
turn to it, nourishing and being nourished by it ; 
if he would stretch forth his hand and live by 
what he can reach of absolute truth, he will 
quickly come across the flaming sword turning 
every way to keep the way of the Tree of Life. 

* Note I. t Genesis iii. 19. 23. 



138 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

"We trusted it had been He which should 
have redeemed Israel." Under whatever form 
this hope encounters us, — from the wild ex- 
cesses of the Fifth-Monarchy Men and Munster 
Anabaptists, to the simple expectation of the 
Dorsetshire peasant, who in Monmouth's rebel- 
lion talked about " King Jesus," — there is al- 
ways something affecting in its expression ; and 
the more so, because the foreseen sadness of its 
disappointment is one which connects itself with 
the natural experience of Christian life. How 
much is there in this to remind the believer of 
what the two chosen disciples must have felt 
when they descended from the Mount of Trans- 
figuration ! For he, too, has known moments, 
perhaps hours, on which the calm of eternity 
seemed already to rest, — still, blessed seasons in 
which he has beheld, not only Moses and Elias, 
but his own life also, transfigured in his beloved 
Lord ; times in which things present were intelligi- 
ble^ things distant clear. And he, too, has come 
down, like them, to meet the full shock of this 
life's perplexity, to be met by human anguish, 
the struggles of the demoniac, the tears of his 
father, to witness and perhaps share the discom- 
fiture of his brethren, " Why could not we cast 
him out? " to listen to their perverse disputings 
as to "who among them should be greatest." 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE, 139 

To whom shall he declare the glorious revela- 
tion? to whom shall he even speak* of the 
things which he has seen and heard? Yea, 
even while he thinks upon the Vision, even be- 
fore it has had time to fade, he may find, by a 
sudden blank and stillness in his own spirit, that 
'' it has been received up again into heaven." 

" A little while ! " said the disciples ; " what is 
this he saith ? A little while ! — we cannot un- 
derstand what he saith." A little while ^ and ye 
shall not see me^ — a hard saying to the loving, 
confiding heart, which would fain abide forever 
where it has found it so good to be, — a hard but 

* " All that I hold worihiest,^^ says David Scott, of the high 
ideal objects to which his life was devoted, ^^ seems to remove me 
from the sphere of other meny A kindred sense of isolation 
must often overtake the Christian, and it is one which he mnst 
learn to meet with a prepared and patient heart. We must be 
content faithfully to speak out what we feel and know, without 
expecting that others will be proportionably affected. These 
things have been shown to us by God himself, worked by His 
Hand into the very frame and texture of the soul ; can the mere 
telling^ even though of truth itself, affect as sensibly? 

Besides this, we must remember that it is not only spiritual 
things that appear " fooHshness " in the absence of enlightened 
receptivity. Young people, for instance, do not, cannot^ believe 
what the old tell them of life and its trials; and what mere 
jargon, to one uninitiated, appears the talk of two enthusiasts 
upon literature and art ! It gives him a secret irritation ; he is 
not only uninfluenced by their zeal, but scarcely believes that 
they themselves really feel what they express so strongly, 
knowing that the world to him goes on very well without this 
foreign element, and could dispense with it forever. 



140 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

inevitable saying. There is a severity in our 
Lord's inner discipline which reminds the be- 
liever of Joseph's making himself strange unto 
his brethren. For it is not the natural man 
only that has to be humbled and chastened by 
Him, the spiritual man also must become as a 
weaned child, and for him there is " a secret, 
low fire " kept long burning. In Christ, as well 
as for Christ, they are to be counted happy who 
endure ; who bear all things, — silence, delay, 
aridity, for thus he trains his Athletes. 

The spiritual life is a world within itself; with 
joys, with sorrows, I would say also with temp^ 
tations^ peculiarly its own ; and he has not ad- 
vanced far within its borders who has not learnt 
the truth of that saying, " I beheld, and, lo ! by 
the very gate of heaven was there a road to 
hell," who has not prayed with holy Herbert 
for deliverance ^^ from the arrow that flieth hy 
noonday, "^^ There is much even in the renewed 
mind which, if suffered to remain there, would 
gradually eat away the heart of its strength and 
purity; something in each believer, which he 
imagined he had left behind when he forsook all 
and gave himself up to follow Christ, but he 
finds that it has rushed after him, like Care in 
the ancient proverb, and holds to him with as 
tight a grasp as ever. 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 141 

How many tendencies, and these not to be 
numbered among such as are the least worthy, 
will seek, like Clovis and his Paladins, for a 
hollow, hasty baptism, that they may be called 
by Christ's name, and fight his battles, remain- 
ing just what they were at first ! Therefore the 
believer, as he advances in self-knowledge, 
learns to bless and to adore those piercing yet 
enlightening experiences of his own weakness, 
which, as it were, let daylight within his whole 
spiritual being. He learns, even in exclaiming, 
" Who shall deliver me fi:om the body of this 
death?" to rejoice in those its deep-seated in- 
firmities, against which he continually prays and 
strives, — he finds many things within him, piti- 
able rather than sinfiil ; hinderances from which 
he longs to free himself, yet learns even in these 
to recognize his true though humble friends and 
helpers ; Mm they compel to hear the cross ; and 
even in that compulsory bearing, his heart so 
grows to it, as to desire no independent strength 
or virtue. " Blessed are ye poor. ''^ Blessed are 
the souls in whom not the strength of nature 
only, but that of grace, has been so brought low, 
even to the very dust, that they have learnt to 
call nothing that they have their own. 

Often must the believer, like Antaeus, grow 
stronger for having touched the ground; often 



142 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

must he experience the sentence of death m 
himself^ — must feel himself a Being without 
heart or hope, incapable and even insensible, so 
that he mav learn to trust, not in himself or in 
any other, but in Him who raises the spiritually 
dead. The Christian must hold on to God, 
through conflicts and agonies ; he must fight 
while his blood runs down and glues his hand 
to his sword, so must he hold on, when that 
hand* is benumbed and stiff with cold; when 
strength and consciousness seem gone together, 
and only an instinct remains through which the 
soul is able to fling itself like a dead weight upon 
Christ. Yet even here is 

* The fluctuations to which spiritual life is subject show the 
wisdom and goodness of God in making so much of it to reside in 
duty, a princij^le independent of the variations of feeling. There 
are long seasons of banishment from God's presence, uncon- 
nected, perhaps, with any sense of His displeasure, in which the 
soul must say, " Make me as one of thy hired servants," and 
during which, even in the absence of sensible love and joy and 
fervor, it may be able to testify that " Great is the peace of them 
thai love thy lawy 

There are spaces and silences in the Christian life, times 
which it is impossible to describe, because " full desertness " in 
souls, as in countries, '' lieth bare," — times when the soul seems 
devoid of the capacity, even of the desire, for communion with 
its Lord, yet even during these its delight in His service may 
continue, because the excellency of His commandment has tnily, 
however imperfectly, become its chief and chosen good. " The 
poor,^^ saith our ]\Iaster, " ye have ever with you^ but Me ye have 
not always.'^ A continual service of love, but a communion not 
as yet abidmg. 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE, 143 

" An overthrow 
Worth many vivjtories." 

Through being chilled and mortified in the small- 
est, most inwardly humiliating things ; through 
being beaten away from the broken cisterns of 
self and of all creatures, we learn, as we could 
never without this have done, to look to Christ 
as our well of life, and so to find all our fresh 
springs in him, as to be able to say with a simple 
and sincere heart, " Lord, give me evermore of 
this water^ so that I thirst not, neither come 
hither to draw." 

" He that believeth shall not make haste." 
Blessed are they, thou good Joseph, who love 
thee even as thou art ; who trust thee in spite 
of thy silence and thy strangeness, thy long de- 
lays, thy repeated questionings, thy withdrawal 
into thy secret chamber, thy protracted tarrying 
there. " Blessed is he who shall not be offended 
in Me." 

For Wisdom, even in this world, is justified 
of her children ; most so of all in Him, her chief, 
her only beloved Son, without Whom was not 
anything made that was made, yet who rejoices 
in the habitable parts of the earth, and whose 
delights are with the sons of men. I know not 
how to speak of that great era in the Christian's 
soul when, whether through the Strength of a 



144 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

patient following, or through the sweetness of a 
loving recognition, it finds Him whom it has 
long loved, and passes,* in that finding, from the 
straitened life within itself into the free outlook- 
ing from self into Christ. When it ceases to 
confer with flesh and blood, to watch over its 
own changes and fluctuations, for the sake of 
attaching itself implicitly to Him who is the 
whole of what we have in part ; when it Hves 
no longer by faith,f but by Christ, holding Him 

* " I have loved thee with an everlastmg love, therefore with 
loving-kindness have I drawn thee." After long conscientious 
serving of God, refreshed by little feeling of joy or comfort, there 
are moments when the soul seems suddenly made aware of its 
own happiness, — when, either through outward circumstances or 
without them, an appeal is borne in upon it as direct, as pleading, 
as distinct, as that which was made of old to Peter, " Simon, son 
of Jonas, lovest thou me? " and it is able to answer out of its 
very depths, " Lord, thou knowest." Its love for its Lord being 
as surely felt, as httle to be doubted as its own being, it answers 
as steadfastly as if asked whether a parent or child was loved — 
it dares even to appeal to the omniscience of the heart-searching 
God, — " Thou knowesV^ Such moments are surely more to us 
than a passing comfort. Do they not teach us something of the 
depth of those words, "PTe love Mm because he first locoed us. 
For is not this also of the Lord, — this tender attraction, this 
warmth, at which the frozen waters of the heart break up and 
flow forth as at the breath of spring? And does not this seeking 
of our love on Christ's part convince us that he is ever loving us 
in our colder as well as more fervent seasons, and that, in being 
drawn by his loving-kindness, we have laid hold on his everlast- 
ing love, — a chain which runs backwards and forwards through 
aUeternity?~J. E. B. 

t Note K. 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 145 

too surely to think of that it holds by, — it 
has done with self-questioning, with self-analy- 
sis; it believes in the love by which it lives^ and 
can appeal for all answer to the fact of its own 
life. 

And I know not what should more cheer and 
gladden a Christian than to see his spiritual hfe 
losing everything of an exotic character ; to have 
it set in the open air, welcoming the wind from 
every quarter ; acquiescing in all things because 
depending only upon on£. A free and sustained 
spirit becomes habitual to him, who, in the break- 
ing of his daily bread, has found that Real Pres- 
ence which sanctifies and glorifies our life's poor 
Elements. When the heart has found its true 
gravitation, it leaves that Rest slowly and re- 
turns to it quickly; disturbing influences will 
be felt from time to time, but their power is 
gone, — " that which is the strongest must winJ^ 
A firm, assured patience grows upon the Chris- 
tian, enabling him to hold upon his way, unde- 
terred, unchilled, by whatever he may meet 
upon it; enabhng him also, I know not to 
what inner music, to build up his spirit to a 
Strength of calm, reliant conviction, even with 
the stones he finds there, as a brook lifts up 
a more clear and rapid voice for flowing over 
pebbles. Roughness and Httleness, indifference 



146 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

and contradiction, for all of these the heart that 
has made room for Christ finds room, in a stead- 
fast, not scornful allowance. 

The strain upon the inner life has passed over 
from self to Christ, and with that strain the 
uneasy pressure which may once have tended 
to something of exaggeration and eccentricity. 
Time was when the believer was often fain, 
with the Gaul of old, to decide a doubtful ques- 
tion by violence, to fling his sword within the 
wavering balance. He can now afford, like the 
practised archer in sending home his arrow, to 
allow for the set of the wind it flies through. 
His heart has grown wise, instructed, tolerant, 
tender with weakness, patient of imperfection: 

" Who is blind as he that is perfect, 
And blind as the Lord's servant? " 

How quiet such a life is ! how fruitful! — fruit- 
ful because it is so quiet ; it works not, but lives 
and grows. The uneasy effort has passed out of 
it ; unresting^ because it rests always^ it has done 
with task-work and anxiety; it serves, yet is 
not cumbered with much serving ; it has ceased 
from that sad complaint, — '^ Thou hast left me 
to serve alone.^'* 

Such a life will seem less spiritual only be- 
cause it has grown more natural ; the soul moves 
in an atmosphere which of itself brings it into 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE, 147 

contact with all great and enduring things, and 
it has only to draw in its breath to be filled and 
satisfied. I know not how to describe the grand- 
eur and simplicity of the state that is no longer 
self-bounded, self-referring; how great a thing 
to such a freed and rejoicing spirit the life in 
Christ Jesus seems ; a temple truly " not of this 
building," too great to be mapped out and meas- 
ured ; * too great to he perfect here. A thought 
for which our mortal life, — a language as yet 
too broken and confused to 

" Catch up the whole of love and utter it," — 

can find no corresponding word.f 

Yet Experience, even the deep assurance 
of our present imperfectibility, worketh Hope. 
Though the Church, like the moon, seldom 
reflects the clear outline, never the full splendor 
of the light she shines by ; though the shadow 

♦ Note L. 

t De Quincey, speaking of the grandeur and subtilty of the 
human spirit, says most beautifully, that all of our thoughts have 
not words corresponding to them; many of them in our yet im- 
perfectly developed nature can never express themselves in acts, 
but must lie, appreciable by God only^ like the silent melodies in a 
great ]\Iusician's heart, never to roll forth from harp or organ. 

In connection with this idea, in how sublime a light does His 
Name — The Word — place our Saviour. Jesus Christ is the 
Word of God, him in Whom the Father's thought has found full 
and perfect utterance. " For I know the thoughts that I think 
concerning you," saith the Lord, " thoughts of peace, and not of 
evil, to give you an expected end.''^ 



148 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

of earth is too often cast between her orb and 
Him, she is still " the faithful witness in 
heaven/' weakness girt about with power, the 
Woman clothed with the Sun, a Wonder in 
earth and in heaven. Though the believer is 
no plant grown up in his youth, fair and 
flourishing, without blight or mildew; though 
he may be far indeed from sealing up the sum, 
*'full of wisdom and perfect in beauty," still, 
in spite of every warp and hinderance, he has 
grown^ and his life has become to him but a 
Prophecy of the life it keeps warm within it, — 

" Close comprest, 
Our Present holds our Future, like a Eose 
That may not yet its perfect Soul unclose, 
Lest angry winds should scatter or molest." 

And as the Christian advances upon his way, 
a sweet and solemn sense of the unity of life 
grows upon his spirit, *'We are complete in 
Him " ; much of our life, if viewed in itself 
only, would appear purposeless and broken, yet 
Christ has said, " Gather up these fragments 
that remain, so that nothing be lost." We 
learn to look at life as a whole thing ; not to be 
discouraged by this or that adverse circum- 
stance, remembering how much there is and 
will be in that life which is " like frost and 
snow, kindly to the root^ though hurtful to the 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 149 

flower,'' fatal to the bloom and fragrance, the 
lovely and enjoyable part of our nature, but 
friendly to its true, imperishable life. Looking 
at ourselves, we may see that, under a slight, 
sometimes a very slight, modification of inward 
bent, or outward circumstance, we should have 
been far more happy, more beloved, apparently 
more useful than now ; yet we may also see as 
plainly, as we confess it humbly, that we have 
attained, through all these losses, to that to 
which every gain is even present, appreciable 
loss. And here I would gladly say something 
of those gracious outward providences through 
which God will sometimes visibly visit and 
refresh the spirit, turning over, perhaps for- 
ever, a tear-stained page of contradiction, and 
unfolding a fresh leaf of richer, happier experi- 
ence; 

" For not forever will he continue thus to thresh it, 

Not to vex it with the wheel of his wain, 

Nor to bruise it with the hoofs of his cattle. 
. • . • « 

In just measure when thou inflictest the stroke, thou wilt 

debate with her, 
With due deliberation even in the rough tempest." 

Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the believer 
will find the current of his existence sweeping 
into a broader channel ; will find " doors open- 
ing" upon him, doors of happiness, doors of 



150 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

usefulness, which will be to him a Gate of 
Heaven ; " windows opening," letting in the 
breath of summer upon his soul, filling it with 
sunshine and sweet air ; suddenly too, in the 
deep emergencies of life, some new interest, 
some friend, will appear like the Great Twin 
Brethren, or Saint of old, in the thick of the 
battle, vanishing perhaps when the fight is over, 
yet blessing him even in vanishing from his 
sight. 

For that terrible saying of Anne of Austria 
to Richelieu holds true for mercy as well as for 
judgment : " My Lord Cardinal, God does not 
pay at the end of every week, but at the last he 
jpaysy God may put his faithful ones upon a 
long and painful apprenticeship, during which 
they learn much and receive little, — food only, 
and "that in a measure," — often the bread 
and water of affliction. Yet at the last he 
pays; pays them into their hearts, pays them 
into their hands also. We may remember long 
seasons of faint yet honest endeavor ; the pray- 
ers o^ a soul yet without strength ; the sacrifices 
of an imperfectly subdued will, bound even with 
cords to the altar ; we may remember such 
times, or we may forget them, but their result 
is with us. Some of the good seed sown in 
tears is now shedding a heavenly fi:agrance 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE, 151 

within our lives, and some of it will blossom, 
perhaps bear fruit, over our graves.* 

There are moments in the Christian life upon 
which the spoil of a long conflict seems heaped, 
in which it can rejoice even with the joy of 
a late yet abounding harvest. Seasons, too, 
sometimes prolonged ones, which recall what 
the historians of the Middle Ages tell us of the 
Truce of God, — set, appointed times when the 
land had rest, and war and violence were no 
more heard within its borders ; so are there 
blessed intervals, wherein the soul reckons up 
many desolated Sabbaths, and enjoys a God- 
given, God-protected rest. 

Light is good, and it is a pleasant thing to 
behold the sun. Yet far dearer than outward 
peace, far sweeter than inward consolation, is 
that, the ever-during stay, the solace of the 
Christian's heart, the imperishable Root of which 
all else that gladdens it is but the bloom and 



♦ " I have remarked," says Palissy, " trees and plants which 
felt their decay approaching, and which before death hastened to 
bring forth fruit and grain before the accustomed time. — What if 
I spoke of men?" 

We may compare what our Saviour says, " Except a corn of 
wheat die, it abideth alone, but if it die, it bringeth forth much 
fruit/* with the fact that his brethren, who did not believe on 
him during his life, were, after his death, in two known and 
other probable cases, his devoted followers and martyrs. 



152 THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

odor; the dry tree* that shall flourish when 
every green tree of delight and of desire fails. 
It is to the Cross that the heart must turn for 
that which will reconcile it to all conflicts, all 
privations ; which will even enable it, foreseeing 
them^ to exclaim, " Yet more." When Christ 
is lifted up within the believing soul, nothing is 
too hard for it to venture upon or endure ; it 
rests upon a power beyond itself, and can bring 
its whole strength to bear upon generous, ex- 
alted enterprise. Show thy servant thy worh^ 
and his own will be indeed easy ! Let this 
powerful attraction be once felt, the heart's, the 
world's great and final Overcoming, and all 
other bonds will weaken, all other spells decay. 
^"^ Midnight is past^^^ sings the sailor on the 
Southern Ocean, — ''Midnight is past; the Cross 
begins to hend.^^ 

Outward duties weary, inward consolations 
faU. Charity never faileth. Let us now turn aside 
and look upon this great sight, — of Love that 
burneth with fire, yet is not consumed ; of Love 
that, having poured out its soul unto death, yet 
liveth to see of that soul's long travail and to be 
satisfied with it. " Behold the Lamb of God, 
that taketh away the sins of the world." When 
were Love's arms stretched so wide as upon the 

* Ezek. xvii. 24. 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 



153 



Cross ? When did they embrace so much as 
when thou, O Christ, didst gather within thy 
bosom the spears and arrows of the mighty to 
open us a Lane for Freedom ! 

" Thou art gone up on high; thou hast led 

captivity captive: thou hast received 

gifts for men ; yea, for the 

rebellious also, that the 

Lord God might 

dwell among 

them." 




Notes 



Notes. 




Note A. — Page 51. 

LOED, what a wonderful spirit was 
that which made St. Paul, in setting 
forth of himself against the vanity of 
d^^^^^^=^ Satan's false apostles, hand in his claim 
here that he in Christ's cause did excel and surpass 
them all? What wonderful spirit was that, I say, that 
made him to reckon up all his troubles and labors, 
his beatings, his whippings, his scourgings, his ship- 
wrecks, his dangers and perils by water and by land, 
famine, hunger, nakedness and cold, with many more, 
and the daily care of all the congregations of Christ, 
among whom every man's pain did pierce his heart, 
and every man's grief was grievous unto him? 
Lord, is this PauVs primacy, whereof he thought so 
much good that he did excel all others ? Is not this 
Paul's saying unto Timothy, his own scholar, and doth 
it not pertain to whosoever will be Christ's true sol- 
diers ? Bear thou, saith he, affliction like a true sol- 



158 NOTES, 

dier of Jesus Christ. This is true ; if we die with 
Christ, we shall live with him ; if we suffer with him, 
we shall reign with him ; if we deny him, he shall 
deny us ; if we be faithless, he remaineth faithful : he 
cannot deny himself. This Paul would have known 
to everybody ; for there is no other way to heaven hut 
Christ and his wayT — Bishop Ridley's Farewell 
Letter to his Fellow-Prisoners^ and those who were 
exiled for the Gospel of Christ. 



Note B. — Page 54 

" T/^ NOW you what our Saviour says to his dear 
M^ Peter ? ^ When thou wast young, thou didst 
gird thyself and didst walk where thou wouldst : hut 
when thou shalt he old, thou shalt stretch forth thy 
hand, and another shall gird thee, and lead thee whith- 
er thou wouldst not J (St. John xxi. 18.) 

"The young scholars in the love of God gird them- 
selves ; they choose their penance, resignation, devo- 
tion ; they do their own will in doing the will of God. 
But the old masters in that love suffer themselves to 
be bound and girded by another ; they go by ways 
which they would not choose according to their own 
incHnations ; they stretch forth their hands, allowing 
themselves to be governed willingly against their 
will; they say that 'ohedience is hetter than sacri- 
fices \' they glorify God, crucifying not only their 
flesh but their spirit." — St, Francis de Sales. 



NOTES. 159 



Note C. — Page 57. 

IN one of Vinet's works on the Christian life are 
some excellent remarks on St. Paul's words, " the 
feeble members are the more necessary." Their 
silent, unseen work, so humble in its mode of action 
that sometimes its value is first learnt through the 
sensible blank its withdrawal leaves, is lasting work 
because it is real work, done and followed, if fol- 
lowed at all, " for the work's sake." But it is evident- 
ly far otherwise when genius, learning, or extraordi- 
nary force of character, things which have a powerful 
attraction in themselves, are consecrated to the service 
of Christ. In spirits thus gifted — its burning and 
shining lights — the Church must be willing to rejoice 
" for a season," for much that they bring with them 
will depart when they go ; the foreign elements will 
break up and scatter when the cord which binds 
them together is slackened by absence or unloosed 
by death. We see this in the lives of all men who 
have been, like Xavier and Schwartz, greatly be- 
loved by man as well as by God. Much of their 
work seems to vanish with them, reappearing after a 
time under humbler forms. 



ICO NOTES. 



Note D. — Page 62. 

" ^ I ^HE poetry of the Psalms is formed, not like 
X tliat of modern languages, by the response of 
answering syllables, but of answering thoughts. This 
peculiar form of composition was perhaps originally 
founded upon that correspondence which a devout 
soul perceives to exist in all the creation of God, 
between the thing seen and unseen, — a correspond- 
ence upon which the teaching of all our Lord's 
parables is grounded. The two things, the thing ex- 
pressing and the thing expressed, exist together^ side 
hy side in fact, and so they fall together, by a natural 
process, side by side, in the poetry which describes 
them. Thus in Psalm ciii. verses 11 — 13 : 

The height of the heavens illustrates the boundless nature of 

God's mercy: 
The expanse from east to west the distance to which he has 
removed our sins. 

The love and pity of an earthly father: 
The love and pity of a Heavenly one. 

" ' So consider the works of the Most High, and 
there are two and two, one against another J (Ecclus. 
xxxiii. 15.) " — Plain Commentary on the Psalms. 



NOTES. 161 



Note E. — Page 63. 

OBSERVE what vivid brightness was cast upon 
all parts of the Old Testament at the first ap- 
pearing of the Son of God, and learn from this what 
will be the radiance of the Scriptures at His Second 
Advent. The true disciples under the Old Covenant 
were ever waiting, "searching," as St. Peter sajs, 
" to discover what the Spirit which was in them did 
signify, when it testified beforehand the sufferings of 
Christ, and the glory which should follow." But 
looking back to the time of Jeremiah, the Maccabees, 
or that of the Second Temple, how strange must 
many passages of Scripture, now sparkling before 
our eyes with divine lustre, have appeared to the 
rationalist of the ancient synagogue! How puerile 
in some parts, how exaggerated and inexplicable in 
others, how devoid of learning and utility must have 
appeared to them many chapters and verses which at 
this day feed our faith, and fill us with a sense of 
the majestic unity of Scripture, cause our tears to 
flow, and bring weary and heavy-laden sinners to the 
feet of Jesu3« What said they to Isaiah liii., to 
Psalms xxii., Ixix., and many others ? How strange 
and little vorthy of the Lord must have appeared 
much that was contained in these, and in other 
psalms, prophecies, and types descriptive of Him. 
Yet what gospel truth has come forth from these! 
What unfolding of redeeming love ! Let us there- 



162 NOTES, 

fore await even more glorious revelations in the day 
when our Master shall descend from heaven, for, says 
IrenaBus, "the Scriptures contain difficulties which 
grace even now enables us to resolve ; but there are 
others which we leave to God, not only as respects 
this generation, but those to come, in order that it 
may be God perpetually/ teaching, and man perpetu- 
ally learning from God the things that are of God." 

Yet then shall we see the full meaning of many 
prophecies, facts, and instructions, whose Divine char- 
acter is now only seen in detached features: then 
will be known the import of those parables, even 
now so impressive, of the fig-tree, — of the master 
returning from a far country, — of the bridegroom and 
bride, — of the net drawn to the shore of eternity, — 
of Lazarus, — of the guests, — of the husbandmen 
and of the marriage-feast. Then will be known all 
the glory of such expressions as these : " The Lord 
said unto my Lord, ' Sit thou at my right hand, until 
thine enemies be made thy footstool.' " " Thy people. 
Lord, shall be willing in the day of thy power." 
" The dew of thy youth shall be of the womb of the 
morning." " He shall wound the head of him who 
rules over a great country." " He shall drink of the 
brook in the way, therefore shall he lift up the 
head." 

Then also thou wilt reveal thyself to us in all thy 
glory. Lord Jesus, Saviour, Comforter, Friend of the 
desolate, our Lord and our God! Thou who hast 
seen death, but who art alive forevermore. Then 



NOTES. 163 

will all the knowledge of heaven be centred in Thy- 
self, — the knowledge which the Holy Ghost even 
now imparts, the knowledge in which Scripture even 
now instructs us, for " the testimony of Jesus is the 
spirit of prophecy J* — See conclusion of Theopneustia. 



s 



Note F. — Page 86. 

EE on this text a sermon by Krummacher.— 
Tower Church Sermons. 



Note G. — Page 101. 

IT is often through the sore trouble of the soul that 
the spirit, the part of us in which God lives, 
is renewed from day to day. When " God," says 
Jeremy Taylor, " would save man, he did it hy way 
of a man " ; yet devotional authors seem little famil- 
iar with that fearful and beautiful thing, our sensitive 
and rational nature, and in their writings slender 
allowance is made for all that middle region of feel- 
ings and tendencies which, themselves neither good 
nor evil, blend with and color for evil and for good 
our whole spiritual life, with which they are linked 
far more intimately than we imagine. In such writ- 
ers, we trace but little communion with the joy and 



164 NOTES. 

sorrow and beauty of this earth, "glad, sad, and 
sweet," so that we sometimes wonder if they have 
known any enjoyments, pangs, or conflicts, but such 
as belong to the life that is in God. To be assured 
that they had joyed and sorrowed, and loved as men 
and women, and as such had felt Christ's unspeakable 
consolations, would be a touch of nature making 
them our kiuo But it seldom comes. St. Thomas ^ 
Kempis, for instance, dismisses a whole world of feel- 
ing in two lines, " Love no woman in particular, but 
commend all good women in general to God." In 
Madame Guyon and Edwards we long, and long in 
vain, to see the hand of a man under the wings of the 
cherubim, and to feel its pressure. There is some- 
thing deeply consoling in a betrayal of personal 
feehng, as when Doddridge laments for his little 
daughter. "This day my heart hath been almost 
torn in pieces by sorrow, yet sorrow so softened and 
so sweetened, that I number it among the best days 
of my life. Doest thou well to be angry for the 
gourd ? God knows I am not angry, but sorrowful he 
surely allows me to he^ Lord, give unto me a holy 
acquiescence of soul in thee, and now that my gourd 
is withered, shelter me under the shadow of thy 
wings." Here we see the man (most a saint in being 
most a man) agonized like his Master, and like him 
strengthened from on high, but by One greater than 
the angel. 



NOTES. 165 



Note H. — ^Pao-e 111 



O' 



WHILE, as regards the great essentials of 
Christianity, things remain as thej are,* 
not as we wish, conceive, or think of them, we cannot 
but perceive a diversity in the way in which we are 
led up to them, which answers to the infinite variety 
of the human spirit. We see how the great Apostle 
of the Gentiles, determined as he was to know and 
preach nothing among them but Christ and Him 
crucified, knew at the same time how to be all things 
to all men, meeting each one upon his peculiar 
ground, while he held his own with immovable tenaci- 
ty. As that which he had to declare remained fixed 
and absolute, he did not change the truth to render 
it acceptable to his hearers, but, as he himself words 
it, he changed Ms voice, so as to bring truth before 
them under the aspect to which native bias or pre- 
vious training rendered them most open. 

We find in Mysticism a tendency to trample out 
rather than to train and modify the bent of nature, 
and this from an ardent desire for union with the 
Divine essence, which touches at every point upon 
Pantheistic absorption, and tends to substitute a blank 
uniformity for the energy and feature of Christian 
life. " Because I live," saith our Lord, " ye shall 
live also," and as living, be partakers in that which 
belongs to Life, — freedom, expansion, and variety. 

* Taylor. 



166 NOTES. 

It has been often remarked, that each one among the 
branches of our Lord's great family preserves some 
portion of His teaching more faithfully, reflects some 
aspect of his character more clearly, than is done by 
the rest ; and passing from churches to individuals, we 
shall find that they who are in Christ will resemble 
each other in so much as they resemble him ; they 
will be like each other (as in earthly relationships) 
without being alike. Our natural characteristics are 
not obliterated ; rather is the man renewed after 
Christ's likeness restored to Himself, that excellent 
thing for which God made him at the first, the type 
from which he had consciously fallen away. 



Note L — Pa^e 137 



O" 



WHEN, and to whom, has the perfect circle 
of Truth been visible? Certain portions 
of it seem always in the shade, though no portion of 
it can remain there long. It seems God's will that 
earnest and faithful-minded men should be continually 
from age to age bringing forward such fragments of 
it as have fastened on their own minds in such strong 
and (relatively) undue prominence, that they are con- 
strained to present them to the world as they arise, 
where, like plants set in the ground with reference to 
fitness of clime and season, they wither, but not before 
they have fructified and shed seed, which, falling on 
a more prepared soil, brings forth fruit to perfection. 



NOTES. 167 

The heat and extravagance with which it was at first 
accompanied fall off like husks from the ripened ear, 
and the truth which these have kept warm, while it 
had to push its way through cold, earthy obstructions, 
unfolds in its fulness. In the physical world this 
holds true of the secrets which disentangled them- 
selves from the follies of alchemy, and perhaps ap- 
plies to many systems of our present day, which, con- 
taining a vital essence of truth, overlaid with much 
that is fantastic, will themselves die out; yet, under 
other conditions, exert an influence on general science. 
So in the moral and spiritual world we see forms 
perishing because of the life that is in them. We say 
Quakerism has decayed and dwindled ; but why ? 
even because the wide and loving principles it pro- 
mulgated in an age of dreary spiritual exclusivism, 
have been, since the days of the Early Friends (the 
first apostles of so many a holy cause), gradually and 
silently incorporated into the thoughts of Christian 
men in general. They^ as Howitt says, have missed 
being a great people, but the truths they so simply 
and perseveringly advocated have not failed of their 
mark. Neander, speaking of reformers of the heart 
only, guided by the pure will without the reflective 
wisdom, says, " Their efforts are as a fire catching 
rapidly at all around it, but working rather destruc- 
tively than as an abiding warmth or a clear, diffusive 
blaze. . . . Before the coming of a great light, its 
approach is heralded by lesser lights, which, after 
shining in the darkness, seem to disappear. Before 



168 NOTES, 

a decisive and general triumph of the right, its way 
is first cleansed by the blood of victims who have 
fallen in its cause, and by attempts that miscarry be- 
cause they were untimely. But a voice from the 
Past (the world's history) assures us that he who 
goeth forth to do battle for the right simply is sure 
of victory, as, although he should be himself over- 
powered, and his work for a season defeated, he has 
yet thereby contributed to the final triumph of the 
right in its proper time." 

The design of the Almighty is like that of the vast 
cathedrals of old at which many generations of work- 
men were content to labor in succession ; each help- 
ing to carry out some part of the magnificent plan, 
each building up some part of his hfe and strength 
in the mighty structure whose completion he could 
never hope to witness. 

" They shall perish, but thou remainest; 
And they all shall wax old as a garment, 
And as a vesture shalt thou fold them up, 
And they are changed ; 

But thou art the same; and thy years shall not fail; 
TTie children of thy servants shall continue, 
And their seed shall stand fast in thy sight,^^ 



Note K. — Page 144. 

" /V ^^ ^' ^^ loving Brentius," writes Luther, 
jLJl "to the end that I may the better under- 
stand this case, do use to think in this manner, name- 



NOTES. 169 

ly, as if in my heart were no quality or virtue at all 
which is called faith or love, but I set all on Christ, 
and say, my formalis justitia, that is my sure, my 
constant and complete righteousness, in which there 
is no want or failing, but is, as before God it ought to 
be, Christ my Lord and Saviour." 

Faith saves us ; but how? — by making us aware 
of Christ, who saves. Faith does not mcJce things 
what they are, but shows us them as they are in 
Christ. Certain systems lay a pressure upon the 
subjective side greater than the spirit of man is at 
all times able to bear; working out all things from 
the depths of individual consciousness, as if truths 
were not there at all until they are [manifestly) there 
for us, Wesley, for instance, felt and preached 
Christ both freely and fully ; yet, from the central 
importance his teaching gives to a conscious spiritual 
work in man, it tends, in some degree, to withdraw 
the soul's eye from Christ, to fix it upon what is going 
on within itself. 

Happy for us, if Christ can look there and find his 
own image reflected, however faintly ; but we must 
look at Him, at the sun in the heavens, not at the sun 
in the brook, its broken and ever-varying reflection. 
So long as we are resting in anything within our- 
selves, be it even in a work of grace, there remains, 
at least to honest hearts, a ground for continual rest- 
lessness and continual disappointment. To know that 
wo have nothing, are nothing out of Christ, is to know 
the truth which makes us free. 
8 



170 NOTES. 



Note L. — Page 147. 

THE Christian's life is no Drama planned to 
correspond with certain prescribed Unities of 
time and situation ; but, because it is a life, it is too 
solemn, too real a thing to be bounded by any such 
limitations. The Bible prescribes no fixed routine 
of rehgious experience, and I know not how to 
express my sense of the crudity, I would also say 
cruelty, of such religious writings as insist upon cer- 
tain phases of feeling as being essential to every true 
conversion ; thus making sad the heart of the right- 
eous whom God hath not made sad. " The Gods^^ 
said the wise Heathen, " give not all things to men at 
all timesP Have Christians yet to learn that certain 
feelings are only proper, say rather are only possible 
to certain stages of experience ? That when we are 
able to receive things we do receive them, and until 
then must be content to wait, abiding in the truth, 
growing up in it from day to day, but forcing nothing 
either upon ourselves or others. 

How carefully should we guard against the passing 
of a religious truth into a religious conventionalism ! 
The deepest expressions of feeling, as when St. Paul, 
seeing so far into his own nature, and into God's 
purity, is able to call himself the chief of sinners, 
become false, commonplace, when taken up by those 
who do not feel, but merely repeat them — when they 
are out of all harmony with the life and conscious- 
ness of the speaker. 



NOTES. 



171 



We may apply this also to the crude admonitions 

so often addressed to afflicted people ; the set phrases 

in which, without any consideration of his fitness to 

receive such sayings, the sufferer is referred to the 

will of God, the love of Christ, for compensation. 

Yet the loss of a felt, experienced good, even 

of an earthly kind, can only be made 

up for by a comfort equally felt 

and experienced, and how 

can that be a comfort 

which has never 

been a joy ? 




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